[mythtv-users] A few basic questions on mythtv usage

Tom Lichti tom at redpepperracing.com
Wed Jul 19 18:37:48 UTC 2006


JCA wrote:
>    I have just got my mythtv box up and running, and so far things
> look terrific. I am particularly pleased because I had far fewer
> problems getting it to work than I thought I would. In case anybody
> might be interested, my setup is a Slackware 10.2 box, with an Athlon
> XP 2600 processor, 512 MB RAM, 2.6.16.22 Linux kernel, an Nvidia
> FX5200 video card, and a Hauppauge PVR-150 MCE TV capture board, with
> the latest ivtv drivers.
>
>    Anyway, I have some questions about the usage of mythtv:
>
>    1) When I watch live feed TV, I notice that mythtv creates MPEG
> files in the appropriate directory, and then plays the files on my PC.
> I.e., there is a slight delay in what I see with respect to what one
> sees on my TV. This is OK; it's what I expected. My question is, how
> are those files managed? That is, at what point does mythtv decide
> that one such MPEG file can be deleted? Is this configurable? Or do
> users have to remove the files themselves explicitly?
>   
MythTV automatically manages them. I believe the default is to 
autoexpire them after 1 day, or if you run out of space before that it 
will expire them sooner. You can also manually expire them if you so 
desire by going to the Information Centre - System Status screen. The 
setting is configurable, not sure where though, I only set it once.
>    2) Is it possible to configure mythtv so that it won't create files
> larger than a certain size? The idea is that when I am watching or
> recording something, once the maximum file size has been reached
> mythtv would simply create another file. This would be convenient for
> burning video material to DVD; see next question.
>   
Not that I know of, but there was something checked in recently that 
might do what you want. You'd have to search the Commit mailing list to 
see though.
>    3) I would like to burn captured material to DVD, so that the
> resulting DVD can be played on an ordinary DVD player. Now I know how
> to do that (with Gimp + dvdauthor + growisofs) provided that the MPEG
> files that contain the video are in the right format for DVD burning.
> Is it the case that the MPEG files created by mythtv already are in
> such a format? I am capturing my NTSC input with 720x480 resolution.
> When I use the tcprobe utility (part of the transcode suite) to find
> out the characteristics of the captured MPEG files, the outcome is
> that they seem to be in the right format. However, since I have been
> bitten by similar issues in the past, I wonder if somebody could
> confirm it
>   
Lots of people do it, there is a project MythArchive that should do what 
you want.

Tom



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