[mythtv-users] transcoding widescreen recordings

Shawn Flynn sflynn1 at rogers.com
Wed Jul 9 16:20:26 UTC 2008


From: David Smiley on July 8, 2008 11:29 PM
> Unfortunately, the "Playback Groups" doesn't let one set the "adjust
> fill" (i.e. a playback aspect ratio) setting.  I'd really love it if 
> it did; it must be an oversite by the developers.  Alternatively, 
> I've rigged my setup to use a different recording profile.
> ~ David

Or better still, have mythtv automatically detect the letterbox/pillarbox
status of the recording and adjust the 'fill' value appropriately. I wish I
were a better programmer, as this is an itch I'd really like to scratch.  

Like you, in the meantime, I've created a workaround that suits me well
enough for now. I run a userjob on the letterboxed 4:3 shows which crops the
top and bottom 60 lines off the recording and resets the aspect ratio to
16:9 leaving all the other video codec parameters the same as the original
file. What I end up with is a 720x360 16:9 mpg2 recording that looks almost
identical to the original (sans black bars). I then insert the transcoded
file in place of the original, run a commflag --rebuild, and mythtranscode
--mpeg2 for good measure, and set the 'widescreen' flag in the database in
place of the 'hdtv' flag (just to satisfy my OCD). The script can be found
at http://shawnflynn.com/2008/07/06/removing-letterboxing-in-mythtv/ if
anybody is interested in using/improving it.

Shawn Flynn




More information about the mythtv-users mailing list