[mythtv-users] Question on recording sizes and DVD burning

[Joseph DeGraw]

On 01/21/2014 11:32 AM, John Pilkington wrote:
> On 21/01/14 15:21, Joseph DeGraw wrote:
>> On 01/21/2014 09:56 AM, John Pilkington wrote:
>>> On 21/01/14 14:27, Joseph DeGraw wrote:
>>>> On 01/21/2014 09:08 AM, Joseph DeGraw wrote:
>>>>> A while ago I upgraded my hardware to include HD recording with a
>>>>> ceton
>>>>> card and its been great. However, My girlfriend wants to burn some of
>>>>> her shows to DVD that are 2 hours long. However the size of the files
>>>>> are like 10 gigs. In mytharchive they can come down to just over 5
>>>>> gigs.
>>>>> The shows are 1920x? HD from comcast provider. I was thinking that
>>>>> reducing them to 720i would be fine to make them smaller to fit on
>>>>> DVD.
>>>>> This brings up transcoding (which Im looking into right now) and
>>>>> profiles.
>>>>>
>>>>> How do you handle this?
>>>>>
>>>>> jdegraw
>>>
>>>>>
>>>> Ok, I have gone into the menu in mytharchive after reading an older
>>>> thread and selected a recording profile. I guess my only question is :
>>>> What do the different profiles mean?
>>>>
>>>> HQ, EP, LP, SD
>>>>
>>>> I know if I select a SD setting it will not finish and stalls out. I
>>>> dont even get an error message. Therefore, Iam trying the LP one for a
>>>> single sided DVD for a 10 gig, 2 hour Lifetime Network movie.
>>>>
>>>> MythTV .27 / Mythbuntu 12.04 based
>>>>
>>>
>>> With much of the USA now apparently HD only this is clearly getting to
>>> be a common problem, and at present I don't think MythArchive handles
>>> it well.  The encoder options are defined here: (Fedora build)
>>>
>>> /usr/share/mythtv/mytharchive/encoder_profiles/ffmpeg_dvd_ntsc.xml
>>>
>>> and are used within /usr/share/mythtv/mytharchive/scripts/mythburn.py
>>>
>>> I suspect that the best option would be two-pass specifying the
>>> required file size; a fairly minor edit of the HQ option, probably,
>>> but requiring some research in the ffmpeg documentation or code.
>>>
>>> As far as I can see the -b:v value doesn't do much.  The pal-dvd
>>> profile, which I use, seems to focus on a q value of 2 as its guiding
>>> light.  That isn't specified in the file above.
>>>
>>> If at present you are getting a 5 GB file the m2vrequantiser option
>>> within MythArchive will shrink that quickly with a quality that should
>>> be acceptable, but I wouldn't like to rely on it for much higher
>>> ratios.
>>>
>>> HTH
>>>
>>> John P
>>>
>>>
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>>>
>> Thank you John,
>>
>> So, It seems that SP is the profile to use on these large HD recordings.
>> Iam having a problem that it seems to take a rather long time to run
>> mytharchive and it seems to be stuck at this point:
>>
>> *mythffmpeg -threads 6 -v 1 -i
>> "/var/lib/mytharchive/temp/work/1/newfile.mpg" -r ntsc -target ntsc-dvd
>> -b:v 4771k -s 720x480 -acodec copy -copyts -aspect 16:9
>> "/var/lib/mytharchive/temp/work/1/newfile2.mpg" -map 0:0 -map 0:1 *
>>
>> I see that mythmmpeg is still running and taking up ALOT of CPU time.
>> Using 'Top' it shows approximately 200 in cpu usage. Seems to just sit
>> there for hours. Is this normal? I dont have any error messages in any
>> of the logs - mythburn.log, progress.log, kern.log.
>>
>> What does show in 'top' is that mythmmpeg is still running and sometimes
>> will spawn another mythmmpeg process.
>>
>> jdegraw
>>
>
> Yes, I think it's normal.   That's one of the problems.  Try
>
> mythffmpeg  -v verbose -i "infileHD.mpg" -target ntsc-dvd "outfileSD.mpg"
>
> on a short recording and see how it goes.  I'm not sure how far my
> experience, with h264 recordings, relates to yours, but the -copyts
> seemed to be the main problem for me.  ffmpeg -i <filename> should
> show what you're dealing with.
>
>
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>
I will give that a try. Thank you very much for your responses.

I did try it earlier on a 1/2 show and it did a good job and burned the
cd. Currently, mythffmpeg is still running but at a lower cpu use. But I
dont see any disk activity. So, Im going to just let it run till this
afternoon. I will also try your suggestion and see what I get.

Last time I actually ran out of swap space. So, I bought an additional 4
gigs to boost me to 8 gigs. Now that is not a problem anymore :)

Nothing in the error logs and mytharchive log still shows the mythffmpeg
command line in the log as the last entry. Perhaps I assumed that
something was going wrong and killed the process, removed the lock file
and cleaned up the temp directory when I should have just let it run
instead?

Thanks,

jdegraw