[mythtv-users] NUV to DVD, at last!

Donn Lee sharky at gmail.com
Thu May 4 03:53:44 EDT 2006


Thanks to the bits of info from this fine list and articles I googled
on the web, and after much trial and error, I finally have a recipe
for NUV/ATSC--->DVD that works reliably for me.

I've documented my recipe as a HOWTO in my blog
(http://mymythtv.blogspot.com). Maybe it will be helpful to others.  I
know that several helpful folks have posted their recipes and I have
learned from each of them.  There were some "learnings" that I
encountered that I did not see elsewhere and I tried to document this
issues and solutions.

Quick synopsis:

The biggest problem I had was audio/lip sync. This is fixed with
ProjectX. ProjectX took me a while to get installed & running and I
documented it on my blog. I have spent hours (days?) trying various
tools to 'fix' the hdtv .nuv mpeg files, and so far only projectx does
the corrections automagically. Awesome tool.

PX demuxes & creates two files (from the nuv/atsc hidef files created
by MythTV): One for video, one for audio. This presented a new
problem, what tool(s) to use to convert the video file to the DVD
standard. After much reading, I settled on avidemux2. The next problem
was that I needed to run avidemux2 on my fast P4 server (because
encoding takes a lot of cpu), but my fast server is my myth frontend
and that has a plasma monitor. The plasma monitor does not support the
high resolutions that PC monitors have, and this is important because
when you load a HD file in avidemux the window is sometimes so large
that you can't see all of the controls/buttons! So, I ran avidemux
remotely via X11 over ssh. To get around a weird error with GTK (used
by avidemux), I hunted and learned that I needed to run ssh with the
"-Y" switch. sheesh.

Back to video: Following one of the many guides on avidemux, I
converted the hdtv mpg video to dvd format. You can also edit out
commercials in this tool. Then I used mplex to mux the dvd format
video with the ac3 audio file created by projectx. This .mpg file is
ready for dvdauthor, and after that it's showtime..

I really wanted to use other recipes I saw, but was forced to use
projectx due to the typical glitches that will be in most atsc/hdtv
recordings. If anyone has suggestions on optimizing my steps, please
post.

I'm now able to free up disk space on my mythtv backend by archiving
(compressing) to DVD. Audio sync is perfect and video quality is very
good for the archiving I need. Thanks to the discussions here, I would
not have been inspired to climb this mountain.

I have not tried avidemux in command line mode and would be very
interested if anyone here does this.

Donn Lee


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