[mythtv-users] building and maintaining seek tables for videos in mythvideo

[David Brodbeck]

jarpublic at gmail.com wrote:
> I have been reorganizing my video library. I am moving a lot of stuff
> into mythvideo. I have material that I transcoded on a windows
> machine. I rip and transcode most of my DVDs on my windows machine. As
> I have been playing stuff in mythvideo with the internal player, I
> have seek problems, where it skips forward or back an unpredictable
> amount of time. Sometimes the skip works fine and sometimes not in the
> same video. I assume this is because these videos don't have seek
> tables. In searching the archives and wiki it seems that using
> mythcommflag with the --video option is the solution. Some posts in
> the archive suggested this was only effective or necessary for mpeg2
> files.
Mythcommflag never really worked for me with most of my video files.  In 
my experience what you want to use is:
mythtranscode --buildindex --video --infile <filename>
Note that this will leave behind a big temporary file in the same 
directory that you'll have to delete manually.

I've found that this is only sometimes necessary for AVI files but is 
almost always necessary to get reasonable seeking for stuff in MPEG4 
containers.  I mostly end up doing it whenever I get annoyed by a file 
that doesn't seek right, but I've occasionally used various incantations 
of the 'find' command to do it recursively on whole folder trees.  As 
far as I know there's no built-in way to do it automatically.