[mythtv-users] Question on recording sizes and DVD burning

Tue Jan 21 21:16:34 UTC 2014

On 1/21/2014 8:51 AM, Joseph DeGraw wrote:
> On 01/21/2014 11:32 AM, John Pilkington wrote:
>> On 21/01/14 15:21, Joseph DeGraw wrote:
>>> On 01/21/2014 09:56 AM, John Pilkington wrote:
>>>> On 21/01/14 14:27, Joseph DeGraw wrote:
>>>>> On 01/21/2014 09:08 AM, Joseph DeGraw wrote:
>>>>>> A while ago I upgraded my hardware to include HD recording with a
>>>>>> ceton
>>>>>> card and its been great. However, My girlfriend wants to burn some of
>>>>>> her shows to DVD that are 2 hours long. However the size of the files
>>>>>> are like 10 gigs. In mytharchive they can come down to just over 5
>>>>>> gigs.
>>>>>> The shows are 1920x? HD from comcast provider. I was thinking that
>>>>>> reducing them to 720i would be fine to make them smaller to fit on
>>>>>> DVD.
>>>>>> This brings up transcoding (which Im looking into right now) and
>>>>>> profiles.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> How do you handle this?
>>>>>>
>>>>>> jdegraw
>>>>> Ok, I have gone into the menu in mytharchive after reading an older
>>>>> thread and selected a recording profile. I guess my only question is :
>>>>> What do the different profiles mean?
>>>>>
>>>>> HQ, EP, LP, SD
>>>>>
>>>>> I know if I select a SD setting it will not finish and stalls out. I
>>>>> dont even get an error message. Therefore, Iam trying the LP one for a
>>>>> single sided DVD for a 10 gig, 2 hour Lifetime Network movie.
>>>>>
>>>>> MythTV .27 / Mythbuntu 12.04 based
>>>>>
>>>> With much of the USA now apparently HD only this is clearly getting to
>>>> be a common problem, and at present I don't think MythArchive handles
>>>> it well.  The encoder options are defined here: (Fedora build)
>>>>
>>>> /usr/share/mythtv/mytharchive/encoder_profiles/ffmpeg_dvd_ntsc.xml
>>>>
>>>> and are used within /usr/share/mythtv/mytharchive/scripts/mythburn.py
>>>>
>>>> I suspect that the best option would be two-pass specifying the
>>>> required file size; a fairly minor edit of the HQ option, probably,
>>>> but requiring some research in the ffmpeg documentation or code.
>>>>
>>>> As far as I can see the -b:v value doesn't do much.  The pal-dvd
>>>> profile, which I use, seems to focus on a q value of 2 as its guiding
>>>> light.  That isn't specified in the file above.
>>>>
>>>> If at present you are getting a 5 GB file the m2vrequantiser option
>>>> within MythArchive will shrink that quickly with a quality that should
>>>> be acceptable, but I wouldn't like to rely on it for much higher
>>>> ratios.
>>>>
>>>> HTH
>>>>
>>>> John P
>>>>
>>>>
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>>>>
>>> Thank you John,
>>>
>>> So, It seems that SP is the profile to use on these large HD recordings.
>>> Iam having a problem that it seems to take a rather long time to run
>>> mytharchive and it seems to be stuck at this point:
>>>
>>> *mythffmpeg -threads 6 -v 1 -i
>>> "/var/lib/mytharchive/temp/work/1/newfile.mpg" -r ntsc -target ntsc-dvd
>>> -b:v 4771k -s 720x480 -acodec copy -copyts -aspect 16:9
>>> "/var/lib/mytharchive/temp/work/1/newfile2.mpg" -map 0:0 -map 0:1 *
>>>
>>> I see that mythmmpeg is still running and taking up ALOT of CPU time.
>>> Using 'Top' it shows approximately 200 in cpu usage. Seems to just sit
>>> there for hours. Is this normal? I dont have any error messages in any
>>> of the logs - mythburn.log, progress.log, kern.log.
>>>
>>> What does show in 'top' is that mythmmpeg is still running and sometimes
>>> will spawn another mythmmpeg process.
>>>
>>> jdegraw
>>>
>> Yes, I think it's normal.   That's one of the problems.  Try
>>
>> mythffmpeg  -v verbose -i "infileHD.mpg" -target ntsc-dvd "outfileSD.mpg"
>>
>> on a short recording and see how it goes.  I'm not sure how far my
>> experience, with h264 recordings, relates to yours, but the -copyts
>> seemed to be the main problem for me.  ffmpeg -i <filename> should
>> show what you're dealing with.
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
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>>
> I will give that a try. Thank you very much for your responses.
>
> I did try it earlier on a 1/2 show and it did a good job and burned the
> cd. Currently, mythffmpeg is still running but at a lower cpu use. But I
> dont see any disk activity. So, Im going to just let it run till this
> afternoon. I will also try your suggestion and see what I get.
>
> Last time I actually ran out of swap space. So, I bought an additional 4
> gigs to boost me to 8 gigs. Now that is not a problem anymore :)
>
> Nothing in the error logs and mytharchive log still shows the mythffmpeg
> command line in the log as the last entry. Perhaps I assumed that
> something was going wrong and killed the process, removed the lock file
> and cleaned up the temp directory when I should have just let it run
> instead?
>

I gave up using mytharchive and use mythffmpeg to transcode my HD 
programs for making DVDs and use a command line like:

mythffmpeg -i <inputfilename>.mpg -map 0:0 -map 0:<1 or 2>  -deinterlace 
-target ntsc-dvd -aspect 16:9 -acodec copy <outputfilename>.mpg

The -map 0:<1 or 2> is used to select the best audio channel which 
usually is ac3 5.1. I leave out the -deinterlace if the program is 720p. 
I copy the audio since I see no reason to transcode it to mp2. For a 
120m movie in 1080i it takes about 140m using my old dual core AMD and 
produces a file which is about 4.1G. The transcode uses about 120% CPU 
according to top.

Then I use dvdauthor and mkisofs to gen the ISO.

John