[mythtv-users] Help with mythtranscode

[Brad DerManouelian]

On Nov 28, 2006, at 1:43 PM, JCA wrote:

>    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.

Update to .20 and use MythArchive? A nice friendly wizard to burn  
DVD's with menus and all that. Well worth the upgrade.