[mythtv-users] HD-PVR issues (mythffmpeg and getcutlist) with MythArchive 0.26

[Will Dormann]

After running MythTV 0.24 for a while, I've finally decided to take the
plunge and upgrade Mythbuntu and MythTV to the latest version.  I'm
currently running: 2:0.26.0+fixes.20121020.

About 2 years ago I made a patch to mythburn.py to 1) manually re-encode
hd-pvr recordings to be DVD compatible 2) extract the cutlist to remove
commercials etc. from that transcoded file before burning.

With the latest version of MythArchive, I'm seeing two issues:

1) mythffmpeg just returns an exit code of 1 without giving any error or
other indication of something being wrong.  My initial solution was to
just replace "mythffmpeg" with "ffmpeg" in mythburn.py.   This
successfully burned an HD-PVR recording to DVD!   Further investigation
of the problem narrowed it down to the "-target dvd" parameter to
mythffmpeg.   There's no status updates written to the terminal, but it
does indeed encode.    Why would "-target dvd" cause mythffmpeg to fail?
  The test commandline I'm using is:

mythffmpeg -threads 4 -v 1 -i
"/var/lib/mythtv/livetv/2339_20121021154630.mpg" -r ntsc -target dvd -b
9000k -s 720x480 -acodec ac3 -ab 192k -ac 2 -copyts -aspect 16:9 -pass 1
-passlogfile "/var/lib/mytharchive/temp/work/pass" "/tmp/mythffmpeg.mpg"
-map 0:0 -map 0:1



2) Despite setting MythArchive to use the cutlist, the output DVD
doesn't use the cutlist.   Perhaps MythArchive hasn't caught up to my
old 0.24 patch yet, or maybe I'm doing something wrong?

My old patch used: mythcommflag --very-quiet --getcutlist -f <filename>
to get the cutlist and then hand that off to mythtranscode to remove the
unwanted parts of the video.

However, it seems that as of 0.25, mythcommflag doesn't support
--getcutlist anymore, and that mythutil should be used instead.
However, mythutil doesn't seem to support the ability to work specifying
only a file name, as opposed to a channel ID and start time.

Looking into the 0.26 mythburn.py, it looks like there's some code in
getFileInformation() that I can use to get the cutlist based solely on
the file name.   However just to make sure, am I correct that mythutil
(or any other script) can't get the cutlist directly by specifying a
file name?



Thanks!
-WD