[mythtv-users] Mytharchive errors

[Rod Smith]

On Thursday 04 December 2008 05:40:51 pm Harry Devine wrote:
>
> OK, its now 24 hours later, and my prompt still hasn't come back,
> indicating that ffmpeg is still running.  Can I assume that this is NOT
> normal?  I have an AMD 5400+ Dual-Core 64 bit CPU, so its a pretty
> powerful.  This now leads me back to my initial question:  why can't I
> archive a recording to DVD using a pre-packaged distro?

That's excessive unless the recording is multiple dozens of hours long or the 
CPU is under heavy load from other processes. As a point of comparison, my 
3GHz Celeron D typically takes about half the recording time to transcode a 
recording -- so it does a 1-hour show in about half an hour, for instance. 
You could check the size of the output file, as specified on your command 
line. If it's 0, ridiculously small, or ridiculously large, then something 
weird is going on. If it's a reasonable size for a partial transcoding, and 
if it's growing in size, however slowly, you could leave it for a while 
longer. You can also use the "top" program to see what other processes are 
chewing CPU time.

As to why it's misbehaving, I'm afraid that MythTV just isn't up to snuff yet 
in that area, in my experience. Personally, I transcode everything manually 
using mencoder rather than ffmpeg, then create a DVD using the "do not 
transcode" setting in MythArchive. In my experience, this works much better 
than MythArchive.

If you're interested, here's my transcode script:

http://www.rodsbooks.com/mytranscode

Note that the script asks a bunch of questions in an interactive way, so it's 
not really suitable for automated use (as in a MythTV post-recording script), 
but it could be adapted for that use. You'll also need to adjust some of the 
variables at the start of the script, like the location of the temporary 
file. After transcoding with this script, either put the transcoded copy in 
your videos directory and copy it to DVD from there or replace the original 
recording with the transcoded copy and then use MythTV's lossless transcode 
option to get it to properly re-register the recording. (You might be able to 
skip the lossless transcode if you just want to burn it to DVD and then 
delete it.)

-- 
Rod Smith