[mythtv-users] Video Cam to AVI, AVI to DVD, AVI playback ??

[Dawson, Guy]

>  
>>
>> Sorry, I left out the "Can we do all these thing from Mythtv?" 
>>
>>I was hoping MythTV could easily rip from firewire source.  I have not
>> figured that one out yet.
>>
>
>not really what Myth is for, it could be done as a plugin if one
>wanted to write one. 
>
>
>It plays AVI, just not very well for me.
>
>It apparently burns AVI to dvd, my mistake on first post.
>
>The only thing it does not apparently do is rip avi from camcorders.  
>
>Mythtv rips CDs and DVDs and deals with Media cards from still cameras,
it seems like dealing with AVI home video >is next....
>
>And I barely have time to get a workable mythbox running, much less
develop new modules... 

I do something like this using my myth box,  albeit not actually with
Myth.  I use DVGRAB which comes from the same source as Kino.  DVGrab
simply transfers the material from the camera to the PC.  In the past I
have transferred stuff into the Myth Gallery directory, which I found to
be better than Myth Video.  The biggest problem with using Myth Gallery
for this is that it does not like the filenames produced by DVGRAB,
although this is easily fixed using the rename command.

The hardest part was getting the firewire to work smoothly,  without
having to invoke special magic every time.  I documented this here
http://cambermaze.blogspot.com/2006/08/getting-dvgrab-to-just-work.html

Having done that one can simply plug in the camcorder,  and run dvgrab.
I run it with options to split the output into separate files, based on
the date and time of the recording.  (It is the date/time separators in
the file names that effect Myth Gallery).  I would imagine that it would
be reasonably simple to include dvgrab in the script that is fired by
the Import menu entry in Myth Gallery.

As far as producing DVD's is concerned,  my daughter does all that,
using Windows based software.  I think it came free with the last PC we
bought.  

If you want to keep a lot of footage on-line,  you may need to compress
it.  My camcorder produces something like 10-12GB per hour,  which is
way too much for me to keep online.  I have played with both mencoder
and transcode,  with reasonable success. Mencoder is (I think) part of
mplayer, so is likely to be on most myth boxes that have Myth Video
installed, but it seems slow.  Transcode comes from www.transcoding.org,
but I seem to remember that it does not do DV format 'out of the box',
so I had to compile it.  

I hope this helps, at least a little.

Guy Dawson
 
 
 

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