[mythtv-users] Setting recording profile with Mythweb and mythbackend, only

[Johnny]

> Currently, I am looking for a VDR, only, and have setup mythtv backend and
> mythweb, only. This works so far. However, I can't get transcoding to
> work. Whenever I click on the transcode button, I get the message that
> transcoding has failed with error 255 and the message "Please ensure that
> recording profiles for the transcoder are set" in the log.
>
> I have googled around and found that normally saving the transcoder
> settings in mythtv frontend should work. However... I have not frontend
> installed, as currently I'm quite happy with the possibilities offered by
> mythweb. Is there any way to create/save a transcoder profile without
> installing myth frontend for this purpose?

If you are just getting started with mythtv then you may want to hold
out for a week or so until they are releasing .22 which is a
significant upgrade to mythtv. There is a release candidate out for
.22 if you want to start now. If you are going to go with .21 there
are much newer versions of .21-fixes out. Are you installing from
packages or from source?

To answer your question more directly. There isn't really any good
reason not to install mythfrontend. Mythtv was designed to have the
frontend installed so you will likely run into more problems if you
don't have it installed either on your backend or on a remote
frontend. You don't have to actually run mythfrontend. So the only
downside is a few megabytes of disk space. So I would just install the
frontend. The transcode button will run the built in transcoders which
I think are limited to MPEG2 and MPEG4 (e.g. divx, xvid). Many people
use other 3rd party transcoders and then run them in a user job. That
is probably the way you want to go. I suggest you look at:
http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/User_job,
http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Nuvexport, and
http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Mythnuv2mkv.