[mythtv-users] PVR250 and commercial skip ?

[Russ Southern]

On Thu, Jul 31, 2003 at 09:21:18AM -0500, Shawn wrote:
> If you're going to archive, why not re-encode? Well, I guess there have
> been re-encode problems, so hours of searching archives would be in
> order. (unless someone here can summarise re-encoding glitches folks
> have had)

OK, I'll bite.

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.