[mythtv-users] Help with mythtranscode

[JCA]

   I am getting kind of desperate here; feedback will be most welcome.

   I am trying to get mythtranscode/ffmpeg to convert some NUV files
into something that I
cab further process into a DVD. I therefore invoke mythtranscode as follows:

   mythtranscode -c 1295 -s 2006-11-25-04-30-00 -f /home/TV -p autodetect

This creates two pipes, vidout and audout, respectively, under
/home/TV. I then launch ffmpeg as follows:

   ffmpeg -y -f s16le -ar 48000 -ac 2 -i /home/TV/audout -ab 384 -ar 48000 -ac 2
   "/home/TV/Barney_and_Friends_2006-11-25_04:30_to_05:00.ac3" -f
   rawvideo -pix_fmt yuv420p -s 720x480 -i /home/TV/vidout -aspect 4:3 -b
  5000 -bufsize 224 -maxrate 7000 -s 720x480 -r ntsc -f mpeg2video
  "/home/TV/Barney_and_Friends_2006-11-25_04:30_to_05:00.m2v"

This starts reading vidout and audout all right. The problem is that
mythtranscode allocates more and more memory at an alarming rate, soon
consuming all of my memory resources.

   As a modification of the above, instead of reading the pipes with
ffmpeg I read them with cat; i.e., once mythtranscode is running I do

   cat vidout > video.out & cat audout > audio.out

These two commands drain the pipes all right (video.out and audio.out
grow quckly indeed) - but mythtranscode still allocates memory without
restraint.

   I then tried invoking mythtranscode with --fifosync. Again, the cat
commands drain the pipes all right, but now the size of mythtranscode
seems to remain stable at some 37 MB. However, when I use ffmpeg as
above, ffmpeg seems to sit just waiting for mythtranscode to write,
whereas mythtranscode just waits for ffmpeg to read :-(

   Anybody got any suggestions? I am using MythTV 0.19, with ffmpeg 0.4.9-pre1
compiled as follows

  ffmpeg version 0.4.9-pre1, build 4752, Copyright (c) 2000-2004 Fabrice Bellard
  configuration:  --enable-vorbis --enable-theora --enable-xvid
--enable-a52 --enable-shared --enable-gpl

All this under Slackware 10.2 and a 2.6.16.22 kernel.

   Other than the issue described above, MythTV has been working
flawlessly on this platform for months now.