[mythtv-users] MythTV to PS3 via upnp

[David Power]

My setup: OTA antenna to Channel Master 3414, which splits the feed to
a TV and HDHomeRun. HDHR feeds MythTV on Ubuntu box (not near TV).
Ubuntu box has a modest OS drive and two 1TB WD green drives (one for
data backup purposes and one for mythtv recordings). TV room also has
PS3 & stereo system.

The 1tb for myth recordings is sufficient for me and I have no need to
save space (I generally do not care to archive -- I'm a been there
done that guy when it comes to tv and movies).  I am happy to use the
full 1080i MPEG2 recordings without further compression until auto
deleted by myth.

Observations in my first week of playing around (April 2009):

The raw YUV recordings (in MPEG2 container) captured by the HDHR have
different underlying encoding practices (slightly different by
program).  As a result, upnp to the PS3 has mixed results out of the
box (no mythtranscode or any other transcoding).  One of 3 results
occur: (1) recording plays fine, (2) recording plays but sound out of
sync, (3) won't play.  Interestingly, the a tv series will fall into
one of these categories and stay there (e.g., if "24" plays fine, the
next episode seems to also play fine).

I tried to improve on this situation to get all files to play fine by
using the advice on this page:
http://dreamingwell.com/articles/archives/2008/08/transcoding_myt_1.php
This page has basic instructions for using mythtranscode to remove
commercials and specifically uses the option "-e dvd" which helped the
author play all his files on his PS3 via upnp.  He doesn't state how
he captures his recordings (might be a PVR 150 or other SD equivalent)
so he may very likely have different codecs in the original files
compared to me.  The suggested command did indeed cut the commercials
fine and produces another MPEG2 file that PS3 can ALWAYS play (yea!),
but alas, with ALWAYS with no audio (boo!).

As an aside, I noticed that mythtranscode was often selecting the
wrong audio track from the original recording. This I could correct by
running a first user job (before the one above) which removes all
audio tracks (except the first one which is generally the one you
want) before letting mythtranscode have its turn.  Here is the code if
it helps someone (see dreamingwell link above for an example of how to
juggle the file names around):  ffmpeg -i input.mpg -map 0:0 -vcodec
copy -map 0:1 -acodec copy output.mpg

Sensing I was close to my goal, I entered into one of those periods of
temporary insanity common to myth users and went through a series of
experiments.  To be clear, I am not an expert, so I use a lot of trial
and error. I tried a series of things to bump the pinball machine into
working. I tried custom builds of ffmpeg.  I tried switching the audio
codecs before and after mythtranscode (libfaac, etc).  At this point I
am out of combinations of things to think of trying (although I have
not tried mencoder or other tools because I have no hint that they
would help me).

As another aside, I borrowed my friend's popcornhour to test it, but
PCH does not seem to like mythtv upnp at all (any of my test file versions).

Any thoughts that come to mind on more ideas I can try relating to PS3
file format would be appreciated.