[mythtv-users] Struggling with MythArchive

[John Pilkington]

On 04/01/13 14:42, Alan Chandler wrote:
> On 03/01/13 22:21, Paul Harrison wrote:
>>
>> If all goes well you should be left with a final.vob that can be
>> passed to dvdauthor to create a DVD.
>>
>> Paul H.
>
> Thank you for your, and John's hard work on this.  I'm tied up with
> other things for a couple of days, but I have flagged the post to come
> back to it towards the backend of the weekend to see if I can at least
> manually create the dvd.
>

While this topic is being aired I'll add a little more.

I don't expect to make a habit of creating DVDs from h264 HD recordings, 
because it's much quicker to start from an SD DVB-T mpeg2 recording and 
the final bit rates have not been wildly dissimilar; but it is still 
seems useful to be able to do it.

I've made a few with commercials removed.  For that I used Mythpycutter 
[1] followed by the mythffmpeg command line from earlier in this thread, 
and then by a mythcommflag --rebuild.  That effectively gets me to the 
familiar SD-recording input.

Although the cut HD recordings play quite well the output from the 
re-encoding showed A/V sync shifts after each cut; but on passing 
through a Project-X demux/remux (outside or within MythArchive) that 
drift has been corrected and the final DVD has been fine.  I suspect 
that without Project-X that wouldn't be true.

I haven't tried the other approach of cutting after re-encoding to 
mpeg2.  It may work well, but I don't know how robust the re-encoding 
would be when asked to work through commercials and programme 
changeovers.  With SD recordings I eventually made a complete switch to 
using Project-X to do cutting and error correction outside MythArchive, 
and I now have almost no failures or A/V problems.  And, using mythlink 
output sorted by title or filesize, I can make reasonably well informed 
decisions on how to fill the space on a DVD.

HTH

John P


[1] http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Mythpycutter

The version as posted needs editing to provide directory info and the 
variables for DB access that were formerly read from mysql.txt