[mythtv] Live transcode while recording

[Chris Pinkham]

* On Tue Dec 02, 2008 at 12:06:34PM -0500, Chase Douglas wrote:
> Without having looked at his patch, some things he has noted were big  
> red flags for me though. For instance:

We're actually talking about 2 different (related) patches.

> "Keep in mind that this is only for the software recorder (aka
> NuppelVideoRecorder), it is not for cards/devices that do compression in
> hardware).

This is the part about the first patch, the one that rips apart
NuppelVideoRecorder and creates a couple new classes called NuppelWriter
and AVFormatWriter which allows the software (framebuffer) capture cards
and mythtranscode to write out file formats other than .nuv nuppel
files.  I've tested this generating things like MPEG-PS files with MPEG-2
video and AC3 audio and things like .flv files.  It's not production
ready, but I haven't had a lot of time to spend on it lately.

> transcoder the ability to transcode an in-progress recording, but that
> might depend on the "multiple files per recording" patch which I still
> haven't had time to finish."

This is the part about the second patch which is sort of related to the
first but neither are dependent on each other.  This patch is mostly a
concept right now, I haven't spent a lot of time coding on it, but have
done a proof of concept patch/hack and a little coding beyond that.
This patch idea is to allow Myth to store multiple recording files for
the same mythconverg.recorded table entry.  So, you could record a show
in high-def, then transcode a low-def SD version for watching on low-end
frontends, and then transcode a .flv version for watching over the web,
etc..  All of these files would be related to the original recording, so
when you delete the recording, all files are cleaned up automatically.
When you watched the recording in the player, it could either prompt
you as to which version to play, or there could be some intelligent
logic to determine what was the best version to play on that particular
frontend.  There's a lot of work involved in this to make it seamless,
it needs to be integrated into things like the AutoExpirer, disk usage
calculations, recording info screen, etc..  It sounds simple, but it's
something that affects a lot of areas.

--
Chris