[mythtv-users] PVR250 and commercial skip ?

[Russ Southern]

On Fri, Aug 01, 2003 at 11:41:31PM -0500, hayward at slothmud.org wrote:
> 
> Russ, I'm ready to do some testing on your scripts.  I have 1 hour of 
> video I'd like to make into a SVCD.  Do you scale the image down? (e.g. 
> record full quality 720x480, then reduce the image to 480,480 SVCD??)

Currently, it uses the parameters you send to mkmovie.  But, mkmovie doesn't
suport image scaling.  It won't be much trouble adding args for that...

Here's how you could help me out greatly.  I'm having quite a time figuring
out how to create and burn svcd/dvds.  I'm sure all the info is out there, I
just haven't yet comprehended it enough to make it all work.

How do _you_ create SVCDs?  Have you been able to start with an mpeg and get
a burnable svcd image?  How?  Have you created dvds (my actual goal)?

> How long does it take to re-encode at SVCD formats?

I have an Athlon 2400, 1GB RAM, SATA drives.  I am using 720x480 res, 2000
video bitrate and 192 audio bitrate.  The whole procedure (see below for
details) takes about 1:1.  mencoder cranks out 45 fps, and transcode gets
about 1800 fps skipping commercials, and 250 fps encoding audio.  It then
"hangs" a while (about 20 minutes) reindexing the output file (I assume).

I have sent Michael my patch today (Aug 3).  I'd like to add support for
image scaling, based on your suggestion.  Send me some details on what you
need, and I'll start on that.  (All this kinda presumes Michael will
accept my patch in the first place...)

> >I am nearly finished with a patch to mythmkmovie (haven't figured out how to
> >hack MythTV, yet, but that's probablly next) to reencode and cut commercials
> >on MPEG files from the PVR-250 cards.
> >
> >Brief problem summary: mencoder cannot seek correctly in VBR files (MPEG is
> >VBR).  transcode cannot deal with both audio and video to/from mpeg (why?).
> >My (not so) happy medium for the short-term is to reencode video only with
> >mencoder, then use transcode to reencode audio and handle the cutlist.
> >
> >It's a bit ugly, but the results are quite nice, with a one-hour TV show,
> >sans commercials, fitting in about 690MB, with _very_ few visible
> >differences from the full-size (4GB/hr) capture.
> >
> >I posted a tome on the dev list yesterday, but got no responses, so I'm
> >pushing ahead with mythmkmovie, for now.  It will take one new command-line
> >argument to enable the mpeg-specific codepath.
> >
> >Russ
> >
> >P.S. Not much time to hack tonight, but I expect(hope) to have a patch ready
> >to post over the weekend.
> >