[mythtv-users] tips on auto-transcoding a recording?

[George Bingham]

Hi James,

I doubt this will be doable in time for you to leave on your trip, but
there's two scripts I've adapted that I have had *some* success with. One
I've recently got to work is called "Handofmyth.sh
<http://pastebin.com/i15qdGpq>"

It requires quite a bit of setup and working on - so may not help you
before tomorrow.
It uses handbrake to do the beefy part of the transcoding and the options
contained within the script for handbrake yield a pretty decent quality
.mp4 file thats between 1/3rd and 1/2 the size of the original, but on my
system it takes about 20 hours to run and my combo desktop frontend /
backend struggles a lot so I decided it's not worth the time.

I am not aware of any "mythtranscode" settings that significantly reduce
the size of a recording, but I am only now getting around to experimenting
with it. My current settings yield a file size only reduced by the about of
commercials it cuts out, so they wouldn't help you.

The other script I've used in the past was called "my_myth_transcoder.sh"
-- I used that a few years ago, but it also used handbrake and would take
several hours to complete for an hour long 1080i mpeg2 recording and the
results were a bit disappointing. (Sorry I couldn't locate a URL from my
notes).

For your purposes it might be fine since you mentioned you weren't
interested in high quality but instead quick and dirty streaming.

I am sure there is a solution, but probably not one you can implement
overnight.

And then there's the issue of getting it to run automatically for a given
recording rule. I never had any success getting that to work, but since it
was such a strain for my system to do the trans-coding I decided it wasn't
worth the effort.

Good luck!

George





-- George

On Tue, May 24, 2016 at 5:48 PM, James Miller <gajs-f0el at dea.spamcon.org>
wrote:

> Preparing for a trip overseas and would like to have the ability to view a
> particular recording that my Myth machine is set to auto-record. Mythweb is
> correctly configured for this, so that part of the equation is in place.
> But how to set up the more crucial part--auto-transcoding the recording so
> that it is substantially smaller and thus quicker to download--is escaping
> me. The recording winds up as an mpg file, one recorded from an unencrypted
> NTSC cable connection. I don't care whether commercials get cut out, btw.
>
> I was able to set up just this sort of auto-transcoding on my old Myth
> system by just ferreting around through the menu system. This time, either
> my memory and technical acumen have become seriously degraded, thus
> preventing me from accomplishing what I previously had done, or some
> changes to how auto-transcoding is done have been introduced--changes that
> are proving much more difficult for me to grasp.
>
> As to what I'm trying to do more specifically, I would like for that mpg
> file that gets recorded each weekday to, once recording has been completed,
> be transcoded into a file roughly one-tenth the size of the original.
> Replacing the original with the lower-quality transcoded version is what
> I'm after. I realize, based on past experience, that the video quality will
> be pretty terrible at the specified file size--I will be viewing it on a
> netbook, btw. But I can live with the quality degradation for the short
> period during which I will be needing to do this. Format of the re-encoded
> file is not terribly important as I will be using mplayer on the netbook
> end to view it, and mplayer seems to handle just about any format I've ever
> tried with it.
>
> As I said, I've ferreted through the Myth menus and have not thus far
> discovered a way to accomplish what I'm aiming for. I also took a look at
> the wiki and tried and experiment or two, but without success so far.
> Finally, I am trying to set this up at the last minute, as departure is
> slated for tomorrow. So it may be asking too much--given my pretty modest
> technical acumen--to try and set this up on such notice.
>
> Any tips on how to accomplish my aims will be appreciated.
>
> PS This is MythTV 27 running under Gentoo.
> _______________________________________________
> mythtv-users mailing list
> mythtv-users at mythtv.org
> http://lists.mythtv.org/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
> http://wiki.mythtv.org/Mailing_List_etiquette
> MythTV Forums: https://forum.mythtv.org
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.mythtv.org/pipermail/mythtv-users/attachments/20160524/c0e2e716/attachment.html>