[mythtv-users] Transcoding to h.264 while staying in Myth?

Raymond Wagner raymond at wagnerrp.com
Fri Jul 22 16:54:34 UTC 2011


On Fri, 22 Jul 2011 11:15:23 -0500, Andrew Bernat <abernat at zathras.net>
wrote:
> Is there a good mechanism in MythTV to transcode recorded MPEG-2 files
to
> h.264 while keeping them "in" MythTV? 
> 
> As background, I am playing around with running XBMC on my iPad as an
> alternative Myth frontend. I've got XBMC set up and talking to my server
> just fine, but the recordings play back really choppily. This is
> undoubtedly due to the recordings being in MPEG-2 (from a OTA HDTV
> recording card) and the iPad not having hardware acceleration.

The iPad does have hardware acceleration. If it did not, you wouldn't be
able to play much of anything due to lack of any significant FPU
performance in the ARM chip.  The iPad's video decoder is the same one
found in Intel GMA500 units, capable of HD MPEG2 decoding but artificially
limited by Apple.  The XBMC devs released a version at the beginning of the
year that uses an undocumented video API that should allow hardware
accelerated MPEG2.

If you want to transcode due to network throughput or storage constraints
on the iPad, check out:
http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Transcode_wrapper_stub
Give it the command you want, and configure it as a user job.  It will the
whatever command you define, delete the old copy of the file, update the
path and filesize to match the new file, and flush the seektable.


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