I'm trying to work around a video playback problem with Fox recordings in KM R5.5.

I want to play Fox recordings using mplayer (via the Watch Videos command).
So I have to be able to select those files from within the /myth/video folder, using the Watch Videos browser screen.

My first idea was to copy the actual video files from the /myth/tv folder into the /myth/video folder.
That worked, but ate up extra hard drive space, as you can imagine.

My next idea was to create symlinks of the Fox recordings in the /myth/video folder.
It does NOT work. The video symlinks do NOT show up in the Watch Videos browser screen.

Is there a way to make idea 2 work? Or am I stuck with idea 1?

Eric

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KnoppMyth R5.5, Asus A8N-VM CSM (nvidia 6150 onboard video), AMD Athlon 64 dual-core 4200+, two 1GB sticks DDR 400, HD-3000 HDTV card, PVR-150 card, Iguanaworks RS-232 IR receiver/transmitter, Pioneer DVR-110 DVD burner

Symlinks work just fine with external players (at least in 6.03). The key is disabling storage groups for the "Videos". (There's a bug in MythTV which causes it not to play nice with external players when using storage groups.)

Experimenting with this reminded me how bad the internal player is for anything but "TV" playback (with all the seek tables and meta data that implies). In under 10 minutes I found 4 different ways to make it go toes up with simple MPEG-2 files. That's kind of breath taking for a component which they seem to be trying so hard to make the only usable option.

I just wish I could save the files to anything but *.nuv nothing recognizes it and it makes transcoding for my android a bigger pain. I know I can transcode within mythtv but mine doesn't work.

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NUV?? I thought NUV files went away prior to 2006?

My Knoppmyth boxes have always recorded files to the mpg format. All I do is connect to my Myth boxes with one of my Windows XP machines (via SAMBA / Windows Networking) and copy the mpg files off to another computer. After that, I can share the files with friends. If I transcode the files for use by friends, I usually use a free tool called SUPER, which is a graphical front end for mencoder and ffmpeg.

In Knoppmyth R5.5, your Knoppmyth box is in it's own network group called KNOPPMYTH.




If you use SAMBA/Windows Network to browse to the /myth/pretty folder you can just drag the files to another pc with their full human-readable filename.






This method works great.

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KnoppMyth R5.5, Asus A8N-VM CSM (nvidia 6150 onboard video), AMD Athlon 64 dual-core 4200+, two 1GB sticks DDR 400, HD-3000 HDTV card, PVR-150 card, Iguanaworks RS-232 IR receiver/transmitter, Pioneer DVR-110 DVD burner

But, I don't have Storage Groups set to deal with Videos at all.

I have mplayer set as the default Video Player.
I have .mpg files set to use the default Video Player.

Do you still think there is a Storage Group setting that will make symlinks visible to the Videos browser?

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KnoppMyth R5.5, Asus A8N-VM CSM (nvidia 6150 onboard video), AMD Athlon 64 dual-core 4200+, two 1GB sticks DDR 400, HD-3000 HDTV card, PVR-150 card, Iguanaworks RS-232 IR receiver/transmitter, Pioneer DVR-110 DVD burner

I'm guessing you never use mythtranscode then. Every file I transcode using any profile (default, high, medium, low) results in a .nuv file in my LinHES 6.03 machine.

These files are really just .mpg anyway. Have a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MythTV#Internals

Here's a useful set of conversion instructions (which I haven't tried yet):
http://www.terrencemiao.com/Webmail/msg00901.html

Mike

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LinHES 7.4
Australian Dragon
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No. I don't use mythtranscode. Hard drive space is cheap, so there's no need for me to transcode.

Do you have any idea how to get the Videos browser to see symlinks?

Eric

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KnoppMyth R5.5, Asus A8N-VM CSM (nvidia 6150 onboard video), AMD Athlon 64 dual-core 4200+, two 1GB sticks DDR 400, HD-3000 HDTV card, PVR-150 card, Iguanaworks RS-232 IR receiver/transmitter, Pioneer DVR-110 DVD burner

WFM in 6.03, I created a symlink in /myth/video pointing to the file in /myth/tv, rescanned videos, then watched the files that were sitting in the TV directory using xine.

The internal player worked too, aside from the fact that it chokes and pukes if you try to skip forward, or backward, or ... I'm pretty sure that switching the video player back to mplayer would work too.

(I used . because I was feeling lazy, it could just as well have been a "pretty" name.) Then I walked into the other room, turned on the TV, switched the input to PC, went to the video menu and played the file.

Frankly the fact that it's a symlink shouldn't matter, it certainly doesn't to either mplayer or xine AFAIK. There maybe something in the setup about links but I don't remember doing anything special there.

This is what I do. Parts of it may help with what Neutron68 is trying to achieve.

First in the /myth/video folder I have two folders and a symbolic link. The first folder is an anime folder. This folder is attached to a nfs share on my file server. The second folder is the archive folder. This is where I keep all my post processed recordings. The third is tv. This is a symbolic linked folder to /myth/pretty. I created the link from the /myth/video folder.
ln -s /myth/pretty /myth/video/tv
Now when i go to the Media Library and Watch videos I see 3 folders. I can navigate from there. The files in tv also have names that are easily understood and you don't have to translate. This helps with the WAF.

Second is to set up a storage group so I can browse the videos from the web. Under mythtv-setup I go to Storage Directories and set up a storage group "Videos" at /myth/video. Now I can browse the videos from the web browser.

Third is to be able to play the videos and recordings on something other than the Internal player. From the frontend I go to Utilities/Setup -> Setup -> Media Settings -> Video Settings -> Player Settings. I changed the Default Player from "Internal" to "/home/mythtv/internal-fix %s". My son made a script that would translate the internal player call to something I could use.

A couple of things to notice here. This is not a generic script. I run a static IP and the script is set to look for it. Also I prefer mplayer. You will have to tweek the script to match your setup.

A few words of caution here. I run this on a Myth .24 / Gentoo machine. I have not tested this on my LinHES test box yet. So proceed with caution and back up always.

A further caveat about that script to translate the stream name into run an external player, it would need to be a lot more complicated if there are multiple directories in your video storage group.

Also, most people here would probably want to drop the audio and subtitle language settings, or use english for the the audio. (You're obviously someone who prefers their anime subbed, not dubbed. )

BINGO! This worked fine and was VERY simple to do - a one step, one time thing!!

Mplayer is playing the videos without stuttering just as I expected (successfully skipping forward and backward in time)!

I see I had the right idea in createing symlinks in /myth/video, but I actually made it harder by trying it one file at a time!

And, we now know that something is odd with the Videos Browser window in R5.5 - given that it can't see the individual symlinks I created in /myth/video, but it CAN see a symlink to a whole folder.

THANKS!
Eric

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KnoppMyth R5.5, Asus A8N-VM CSM (nvidia 6150 onboard video), AMD Athlon 64 dual-core 4200+, two 1GB sticks DDR 400, HD-3000 HDTV card, PVR-150 card, Iguanaworks RS-232 IR receiver/transmitter, Pioneer DVR-110 DVD burner

For the record I don't know what I was thinking my HDTV recordings are mpg I think my analog cable recordings were nuv. Sorry for the confusion.

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