[mythtv-users] MythArchive -- why I've given up

Marc Barrett mnealbarrett at cox.net
Sat Jun 16 17:36:37 UTC 2007


I recently posted a question about recording VHS movies to MythTV.  Several people then
assumed that my real intention is to use MythTV as a "dubbing station" for transferring videos 
to DVD.  That is honestly not my intention.  I've completely given up on MythArchive, because I
just cannot get it to work.  So my real intention is to transfer a few VHS movies to my hard
drive and keep them there.  

Anyway, I thought I'd ask about MythArchive, and maybe offer a few suggestions.  There are
two real problems with MythArchive for me: it is too complicated, and takes far too long to 
run.  There are a lot of settings for this and that, and every test of a setting or a combination
of settings takes FOUR HOURS to run.  So far I've just ended up with discs where the audio 
was subtly but noticeably out of sync with the video, or discs with some kind of "fringes" 
around movements in the video, and so on.  Something or other ends up going wrong
every time I've tried.  If each test took, say, five minutes, I could figure it out, but with  each 
one taking hours, I gave up.

My suggestion would be for a way to record a show in a format such that it would be 
ready to dump to a DVD in a fashion that takes much less time.  The show would be 
stored on the hard drive so that no further transcoding would be necessary, and the 
show could be dumped to a DVD in minutes.  Something like this appears to already
be there (I've seen settings for transcoding after recording in the setups), but every time
I've tried MythArchive some further transcoding always seems to be required.

Too bad gputrans does not appear to have gotten very far.  I have a good nvidia card, and
if transcoding really is necessary, it would be nice to be able to use my card to speed it
up.



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