[mythtv-users] Cleaning up DVB-T recordings

[Nick Rout]

On Thu, Jan 21, 2010 at 5:14 AM, Mike Perkins
<mikep at randomtraveller.org.uk> wrote:
> Nick Morrott wrote:
>>
>> 2010/1/19 Mike Perkins <mikep at randomtraveller.org.uk>:
>>>
>>> I've been looking at some of my recordings, intending to trim the garbage
>>> from the ends and then possibly achive them away. Standard stuff.
>>>
>>> Unfortunately, because they are OTA reception, there are occasional
>>> errors
>>> during transmission. On most of these they are no more than the odd
>>> blemish.
>>>
>>> However, I can't run these through mythtranscode because it barfs on the
>>> errors. Is there anything available I can run these through that will
>>> 'clean
>>> up' these files so that I can then process them? Something that will
>>> discover the errors and substitute them with a suitable 'fake' block
>>> which
>>> will permit me to process further? It doesn't have to look any prettier
>>> than
>>> what was there before, just legal for the file format.
>>>
>>> I would be interested in Linux solutions only.
>>
>>
>> ProjectX (written in Java) has always fixed my UK DVB-T recordings
>> containing reception errors, and I've recommended it for years. I'm
>> currently using the CVS version from the beginning of this year,
>> available from http://sourceforge.net/projects/project-x/.
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Nick
>>
> Yeah... well, if I could find out how to use the thing, maybe I would.
> Firing up the GUI gives me a screen filled with so much bling I need dark
> glasses...
>
> Running it as a CLI, amongst a whole load of other verbage I get:
>
> !> an error has occured..  (please inform the authors at
> 'forum.dvbtechnics.info')
> No matching FileType found or file doesn't exist: '--help'
>
> Sheesh. Even (!) mythtv does better than that.
>
> It does, in fairness, then print some possible options (all of which have
> ONE preceding hyphen not two, don't you just love standards?), but I have no
> idea what most of them mean.
>
> There's NO DOCS. I'm not running a complex app like that on my files if I
> don't have a clue what it's doing (and I have very little clue what I want
> it to do in the first place). I don't want it to destroy my programs in the
> process of trial-and-error either.
>
> No Docs. No help files. Nothing at SourceForge. A GUI laid out last century.
> Don't you just love Open Source?

There are some tutorials for it online if you know where to find them!
There's one on doom9.org
http://www.doom9.org/index.html?/DigiTV/projectx.htm and
http://www.doom9.org/index.html?/DigiTV/projectx.htm

There is also some commandline help by running

projectx --help|less

however to simply fix errors in files, from the commandline run

projectx filename.mpg

It'll demux and fix the errors leaving filename.m2v and filename.mp2,
being the video and audio files respectively. mux them back together
with mplex. Pretty easily scriptable.

Extra for experts: extract the cutlist from myth's database and
convert it to the format projectx uses, then use it with the -cut
option to projectx. I haven't tried that. I have used the projectx gui
to create a cutlist and saved it. I cannot remember offhand how the
projectx cutlist format compares to what appears in the myth database
after a commflag or manual edit.

At present I think projectx works only with mpeg2 files, not h264.

On this subject dvbcut is an excellent gui for cutting ads etc, and
also seems to fix sync problems when it saves the resulting file.