[mythtv-users] PVR recordings to DVD

[creator at inreach.com]

Hay all, I've been playing around with getting the mpeg2 recordings produced 
by my PVR through myth to be recognized by dvdauthor so I can burn them to a 
dvd without going through a transcode process...  and I've finally got 
something that works!  So, I thought that i'd share...

Here's the key... For some reason, dvdauthor will not recognize the 
recordings, so they must be ran through transcode at some point to fix them 
up a little.  The way I found that was to use the transcode utilites to demux 
and then remux the file, but never running a full transcode process.  This 
way the whole process is really fast (disk bound) but you will need to have 
some spare space lying around.

Here's my simple test script...

#!/bin/bash
tcextract -i $1 -x mp3 > $1.m2a
tcextract -i $1 -x mpeg2 > $1.m2v
tcmplex -i $1.m2v -p $1.m2a -o $1.vob -m d
rm -f $1.m2v $1.m2a
mkdir testing
dvdauthor -o testing -t $1.vob
rm -f $1.vob
dvdauthor -o testing -T
mkisofs -dvd-video -o testing.iso testing/
rm -rf testing

And it seems to work!  I've burned the output iso to a DVD-RW and played it in 
my sony dvd player and it works great!  The only downfall is that the 
compression on the file sucks and it takes nearly a full disk for only an 
hour of video (3.6 gig).  This is of course with myth set to record at 
720x480 at it's max bitrate with the stream type set to 10 (dvd). 

My next project is to try to find an effient way to re-encode these to have 
better compression so I can fit two hours onto a dvd-r (like we can currently 
with our tivo recordings) and to chop commericals out (but that may just be a 
pipe dream).

If anyone else has this working or has a different method you're working on, 
please let me know.

Thanks!

Robert Stellhorn
creator at inreach.com