[mythtv-users] Mytharchive errors

[Harry Devine]

Rod Smith wrote:
> 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.)
>
>   
I'll give your script a try, but in the mean time, maybe you can clear 
up some confusion for me.  I had the recording use the Autodetect 
transcoder.  I'm actually transcoding the recording that I want to 
archive again now just to see what happens.  I guess I'm not really sure 
if I need to change anything in the Transcoder settings, or transcode 
the recording using another transcoder before archiving it.  I won't 
archive every recording, but if I think I might want to, I could set it 
up to record using another one other than Autodetect.

Thanks for the help!
Harry