[mythtv-users] .25 mythtranscode copy over in .26 failing after upgrade

[Ian Evans]

On Tue, Feb 26, 2013 at 11:35 AM, Rich Freeman
<r-mythtv at thefreemanclan.net> wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 25, 2013 at 1:00 PM, Neil Salstrom <salstrom at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Is it possible to take another approach at this rather than try and
>> resurrect mythtranscode?  Would it be possible to pass a command to
>> something like handbrake to do the transcode but keep the recording
>> still in Recorded Programs rather than moving it to Mythvideo?
>
> I'd love to see a solution like this.  Handbrake (and similar
> projects) are highly mature transcoding solutions, and it seems like
> mythtranscode is struggling to be adequate.
>
> Cutlists would be a problem though - I don't personally need them as
> long as the breaks are marked in the new program.  However, having
> mythtranscode do ONLY lossless transcoding while respecting cutlists
> would make it a good front-end to other transcoding solutions where
> everything else could be manipulated.
>
> I don't know if mythtv is less fussy about keyframes than it used to
> be.  I know in the past the player would assume that keyframes were
> evenly positioned every 15 frames or so, and the seektable stored
> framenumber/keyframerate instead of just frame numbers as a result.
> That is bound to make transcoding more painful and less efficient -
> you can't stick the keyframes on scene changes.  Fixed keyframes do
> not make as much sense on seekable media as they do in broadcast.  Now
> that mythvideo has a reasonably robust internal player I'd think we
> should be close to lifting this limitation (it obviously has to cope
> with irregular keyframe intervals).

My situation is a bit opposite. I'd say 90% of the time I just use
mythtranscode purely for lossless cutting. Running a bit low on space
and if we don't have time to watch everything that week, I can often
save over a gig on a half hour show. So mythtranscode is purely a
commercial cutter for me. I do use a Handbrake job to chop down the
size of old SD shows that are being broadcast on HD channels. After
cutting commercials with Mythtranscode and then using Handbrake, a 30
minute SD show is less than 150MB.

I know that a lot of people argue to just make the cutlists but don't
cut the file, even losslessly. Hard drives are cheaper than power,
etc. But they're not cheap enough for me right now and with about 98
gigs of space left, it's amazing how fast a few PBS docs can fill that
up. Saving a gig or three here and there really helps.