[mythtv] mythencode.pl script

[Geoffrey Hausheer]

On Fri, 11 Jul 2003 05:58:56 -0500, "mojo mojospam-at-thegeekclub.net"
said:
> ROFL... yeah i just spent half the night reading the mencoder mailing 
> list archives and trying the -noskipyourewastingyourtimetryingthisoption 
> options... it boggles my mind that it plays the damned file fine!! i do 
> notice an increase/decrease in the number of duplicates i get depending 
> on my source recording codec settings... i'm hoping that transcoding 
> will allow me to record to something that should not drop any frames. 
> Like recording to rtjpeg then converting to mpeg4 without the 
> commercials to save space... the resulting mpeg4s should then not have 
> any duplicate frames because no frames ever got dropped... right? 
> (please say yes... i desparately need hope)
Don't keep your hopes up for this.  In theory, it may work in full
processing mode, but normally, we try to preserve quality by not
re-encoding the audio (and now video) unless we really need to.  The
transcoder will reproduce all video frames on a frame-by-frame basis, so
the only thing which is getting 'fixed' is likely the headers
(timecode/frame-number), and even there, we try to preserve them as much
as possible.  Anyhow, I don't know what is actually causing this problem,
so I can't speculate on what is needed to satisfy mencoder, but I
wouldn't put too much hope on the transcoder being a magic bullet.

> hmmm.. MythMKmovie eh? im going out of town for a wedding this weekend 
> but i will try that... the other thing i considered is that if mplayer 
> plays it back just fine there must be someway to dump it to disk or run 
> the video output on that computer into the DVI inputs of another windows 
> computer... haha... im nuts i know but i promised my friend i'd record 
> this show for him and its real important to him cause he knows some of 
> the people appearing in the TV show and wants a digital copy of it.. and 
> he doesnt use linux!

Mencoder will build on windows using mingw.  And the nuv patch applies
cleanly.  So you CAN play nuv files on windows, though it isn't exactly
convenient.

> anyway.. thanks for the help... i read so many archive posts on this 
> topic that went unsolved i was getting to wonder if anyone cared about 
> portability?

There has been discussion of this before.  The team does care about
compatibility, but not at the cost of losing features.  There is a chance
that Ogg Theora will satisfy their requirements whenever it gets released
(probably not for another 6 months or more), in which case you might get
a 'standard' container then, though it won't exactly be mainstream.

As a side note, I was thinking of revisiting the inclusion of mythtv into
debian main.  If we added support for VP3 and ogg, and made building with
ffmpeg/lame configurable, it should be possible to have a version of
mythtv that is fully DSFG and patent clean, right?  Even if Theora is way
behind, the VP3 encoding should be pretty mature, no?

.Geoff
-- 
  Geoffrey Hausheer
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