[mythtv-users] mythburn - wow - this takes a LOOOONG time...

[Jesse Guardiani]

Jesse Guardiani wrote:
> On Sunday 18 September 2005 4:32 pm, Paul wrote:
>   

[...]

>> Not sure what they are but I don't see any of these 'found startcode' or 'missing startcode'
>> messages in my log. Do you get the same message with other files too? Are the DVD's
>> created playable?
>>     
>
> Hmmm... that's it! I tried another show recorded more recently and it works fine.
> Either that one show, or shows before a certain date are just bad. The show
> plays on my 350 just fine, but I've changed ivtv versions quite a bit since I
> started running mythtv, so it's possible a bunch of them are "bad".
>
> It only takes about 30 minutes to fully process a 30 minute show now. Very cool!
> Thanks!
>   

Definitive update on this:

Yes, it's an ivtv problem. It seems to be fixed in 0.3.8, but previous 
versions, probably just in the 0.3.7x line
would generate "bad" mpeg files. The PVR 350's hardware decoder didn't 
care, so I never noticed, but
projectx cares, and slows to a crawl when it encounters such a "bad" 
mpeg file.

Hui Zhou, from the ivtv-devel list, was kind enough to write a C program 
named "packfix.c" that will take
a "bad" mpeg file and generate a fixed mpeg file from it. I won't post 
the code here, as it's Copyright: Hui Zhou
and I haven't asked permission, but anyone interested can pick it up 
from the mailing list archive here:
    http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/ivtv/devel/24204

packfix is a life saver! It took somewhere around 10-15 minutes to fix a 
4gb movie file. After that, mythburn
didn't have any problem at all processing the fixed file.

I plan to write a simple shell script tonight to process an entire 
directory. I'll post it here in case anyone else
runs into this problem.

Thanks!

-- 
Jesse Guardiani
Programmer/Sys Admin
jesse at wingnet.net