[mythtv] transcoding with cutlist

Chris Petersen lists at forevermore.net
Sun Aug 10 13:11:51 EDT 2003


> Good.  I am thinking I will revamp the db options again.  It is overly
> complicated to enable the transcoder today.  I am not sure there is a
> good reason not to hardwire thenumber of transcoders at 1, and have the
> polling thread always running.  Also the 'Flag commercials' should always
> be set. Then the only option would be whether you want auto-transcoding
> on or not (during auto-transcoding, the cutlist would be ignored).

I'm fine with that.  IMHO, there really is no reason why commercials
should NOT be flagged - since it's not like they're automatically
skipped unless you tell myth to do so. 

> I didn't want to because it meant polling
> the db every 30 seconds, and didn't seem a good idea at the time, but it
> is probably the right way to go now.

I doubt it would hurt that much.  Though since at least part of the
transcode process is integrated with myth, wouldn't the backend know
when a user has set up a transcode?  just poll the database at that
point, and then again when that process finishes.  Basically, do what
you do now with the linked-list in memory, but instead of storing
transcode data, just store a "please check transcode db" flag.

> In any case, whatever I do, I'll
> make it so hitting 'X' again will remove the program from the queue.

oh, that's a great idea.  make it work more like the save-position stuff
(if the transcode has already started, should probably alert the user
and ask if he/she is sure).  However, you'll need some way to kill an
in-progress transcoder if the user requests it.

> > And lastly, on at least one transcode (still waiting for others to
> > finish), only the first cut section was removed.
> I've never seen that happen either.

weird.  It happened on everything I transcoded yesterday.  The 1-gig
copy of Stargate Lowdown went down to 976 megs, and only the first
commerial was cut.  Other things also dropped only about 25 megs or so,
and seemingly only lost their first commercial (since the cutlist wasn't
deleted, it was easy enough to see that the transcoded version's
commercials didn't line up with my original cutpoints).

Would it make any difference if I'm starting the transcode from a
machine different than the backend?  I did think it was a little weird
that I had to set max_transcoders on a per-host basis....

> Yes I did that on purpose.  Of course it means you can fill up your
> hard-drive pretty quickly, but until the transcoder has had more testing
> than just by me, I think it is safer to leave it there.

I wholeheartedly agree with this.  Though if nothing else, an option
could pop up when you hit X, asking you whether or not you want to keep
the old file around.  That's probably the best way to handle things once
things are completely stable.

-Chris



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