[mythtv-users] Problem(s) transcoding with cutlist on MythTV 0.27

[John Pilkington]

On 21/05/2020 18:08, faginbagin wrote:
> On 5/19/2020 3:48 PM, Craig Huff wrote:
>> First, I _know_ I need to update to the latest MythTV, and I really should have already moved on from Ubuntu 14.04.6, but I've been busy and what ain't broke don't get fixed.
>>
>> I have only now been interested in converting an off-the-air recording by removing the cutlist and putting it onto a DVD.  I made all the cuts at keyframes.  When I tried running mythtranscode manually with:
>> mythtranscode --chanid 1265 --starttime 20200518025900 -m --honorcutlist -o \ ~/vid/test.mpg
>> I got an empty test.mpg file and a _lot_ of "Warning: partial frame found!" messages followed by:
>> No more queue slots!
>> Transcoding /video1/recordings/1265_20200518025900.mpg failed
>>
>> Looking at various pages in the MythTV wiki pointed to possible alternatives, but they seem to depend on other programs that no longer exist or at least aren't available from the package managers.
>>
>> The video in question has five internal cuts to be made, along with trimming off the beginning and the end, so there are a manageable number of cutpoints to enter manually if I knew how to get the right data and what to do with it.
>>
>> Any suggestion on how to get this done that won't involve reinstalling a newer version of MythTV and/or upgrading from the last great Mythbuntu distro would be welcome.
>>
>> --
>> Craig.
> 
> I used to use mythtranscode (via mythburn.py) all the time to copy recordings to DVDs when I was on 14.04 and 0.27. The command line was essentially the same as what you are using, for example:
> mythtranscode --mpeg2 --honorcutlist --chanid 2200 --starttime '2015-04-15 01:00:00' --outfile /video/test/newfile.mpg
> In fact, I just ran it on my 18.04 v29 system, and it worked just fine.
> 
> One thought, when I was copying to DVD, I always made sure the cut points were at key frames. Maybe that's your problem? If so, you can go back into the cutlist editor and fix that. See:
> https://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Editing_Recordings
> to find out how to navigate to key frames.
> 
> The other possibility is that the recording is not MPEG2 (assumed by the -m/--mpeg2 option of mythtranscode). In that case, you will have to use something other than mythtranscode to cut commercials. You can use the mythffprobe command, which is installed by mythtv-common package, to find out what video codec is in a given recording, e.g.:
> mythffprobe /video1/recordings/1265_20200518025900.mpg
> 
> Here's what mythffprobe v29 reports for the file I used on mythtranscode:
> ffprobe version 3.2 Copyright (c) 2007-2016 the FFmpeg developers
>    built with gcc 7 (Ubuntu 7.4.0-1ubuntu1~18.04.1)
>    configuration: --compile-type=profile --prefix=/usr --runprefix=/usr --disable-mythlogserver --enable-crystalhd --enable-lirc --enable-audio-alsa --enable-audio-oss --enable-dvb --enable-ivtv --enable-firewire --enable-joystick-menu --with-bindings=perl --enable-ffmpeg-pthreads --enable-pic --perl-config-opts='INSTALLDIRS=vendor' --enable-libvpx --enable-sdl --enable-libmp3lame --enable-libx264 --enable-vdpau --enable-opengl-video --enable-vaapi
>    libavutil      55. 34.100 / 55. 34.100
>    libavcodec     57. 64.100 / 57. 64.100
>    libavformat    57. 56.100 / 57. 56.100
>    libavdevice    57.  1.100 / 57.  1.100
>    libavfilter     6. 65.100 /  6. 65.100
>    libswscale      4.  2.100 /  4.  2.100
>    libswresample   2.  3.100 /  2.  3.100
>    libpostproc    54.  1.100 / 54.  1.100
> [mpegts @ 0x55d62659f2c0] PES packet size mismatch
> Input #0, mpegts, from '2200_20150415010000.mpg':
>    Duration: 00:59:58.40, start: 93985.453344, bitrate: 11931 kb/s
>      Stream #0:0[0x1bb1]: Video: mpeg2video (Main), yuv420p(tv, progressive), 1280x720 [SAR 1:1 DAR 16:9], 59.94 fps, 59.94 tbr, 90k tbn, 119.88 tbc
>      Stream #0:1[0x1bb2](eng): Audio: ac3 (AC-3 / 0x332D4341), 48000 Hz, 5.1(side), fltp, 384 kb/s
>      Stream #0:2[0x1bb3](spa): Audio: ac3 (AC-3 / 0x332D4341), 48000 Hz, stereo, fltp, 128 kb/s
> 
> The 0.27 of mythffprobe should produce something similar.

Yes, I think the 'mythtranscode -m --honorcutlist' requires an 
mpeg2video input file, like the one above.

The standard way of creating a DVD was to use mythburn.py in the 
MythArchive plugin, which IIRC attempted to convert non-DVD formats to 
mpeg2video before applying the cutlist, creating menus etc.  I used it a 
lot, but with a minimum of internal options because each one increased 
the chance of failure with no obvious way of recovering.  But it might 
work for you...

John P