[mythtv-users] Problems with transcoded avi files

[Eric Gilbert]

On 10/4/06, Charles philip Chan <cpchan at sympatico.ca> wrote:
> On  3 Oct 2006, eric.gilbert at gmail.com wrote:
>
> > To the best of my knowledge the MythTV implementation of the Nuppel
> > Video Format lacks an internal index ... and seeking in mplayer and
> > your divx player probably are expecting an index to seek on.
>
> I remember reading this somewhere. However, for some reason, mplayer is
> able to seek in the original nuv file.

I stand corrected by Isaac, but I'm not sure how exactly how to get at
the index with an external tool. I assumed that since I could not seek
with my handheld video player after simply repacking the audio and
video into an avi that there was no index to bring in. I guess I've
got to continue looking at the NuppelVideoRecorder source and related
files to better understand what it is doing.

I remember there is a nuv2avi program
(http://mythtv.beirdo.ca/nuvtools/nuv2avi.php) but I have not tried it
in months.  I had problems with the resulting files on my handheld
video player, so I went with avidemux. That might also work just fine
for you.

> > I use avidemux to add an index and wrap the file with an avi
> > container, and have had no problems with the output.
>
> Thanks, avidemux2 works fine. My only problem with the program is that
> it keeps insisting on bringing up the GUI, thus it is not really good
> for cron job scripting which is what I want to do. Ideally I want to run
> mythtranscode (with a copy profile) to remove commercials from files
> that I put into an input directory, put the video and audio in an avi
> container, delete the original and move the resulting files to an output
> directory once they are done.
[snip]

Xvfb is your friend on this. I've got a similar job running in a shell
script with the following:

#!/bin/sh
ps -ef | grep Xvfb | grep -v grep >> /dev/null || Xvfb :13 -screen 0
640x480x16 \
-fp /usr/lib/X11/fonts/misc/ &
export DISPLAY=:13.0
filename="${1}"
/usr/bin/avidemux --load ${filename} --rebuild-index --output-format
AVI --save ${filename}.tmp --quit > ${filename}.log && mv -f
${filename}.tmp ${filename}

This sets the avidemux gui to use the virtual frame buffer, but make
sure that you have the correct home export otherwise avidemux will
complain about settings being missing.

Cheers,
Eric