I cannot speak of anyone on the dev list... But submit it and see what comes about.

_________________
cesman

When the source is open, the possibilities are endless!

spit,

Thanks for a great program!
Although I have been having trouble with it (no sound on the DVD:s) I find it a very nice program, and I offer my help in coding a python version. I have some experience with python, and hopefully I would like to help.
Even though I cannot speak for the mythtv devs I think that mythburn still is a bit to crude to really integrate nice. My experience with mythburn is that the installation process is very quirky and non-unix-wayish. It would be much nicer to run a configure script, run make and make install. From there a plugin will be added to mythweb (or in the future, as a plugin to myth itself?), from which you can delete the original source code.
Also, one thing that I miss is concistency in the naming. Sometimes it is called mythburn and sometimes mythtvburn. Please use mythburn only, that name makes much sense and compiles to the other myth plugin names.

I also have a bug to report: If a genre of a recording contains a ' (a single quote), like "Children's", imagemagick will fail.

A lenghty post, but if you need help contact me at etnoy at broach dot se.

Just found this thread today. I love MythBurn. Setup was a pain (dependency problems), but once I got it working it's really *really* easy to use. Probably easier than anything else out there right now. I think that's the main strength, and I think above all else that strength should be maintained. My current wish list (coming from a 0.18.1 perspective):

1.) An in-mythfrontend UI would be nice. (My wife doesn't like the web interface because she never uses it for anything else. There's something to be said for familiarity.) Just so long as it doesn't keep the user from watching tv/videos/recordings while the burn is progressing. I like the idea of adding things to a playlist, then starting a background job and being able to use MythOSD and a MythBurn menu option to check up on the status of the burn operation.

2.) Please don't do away with MythBurn via the web interface entirely. It's quite handy when you only have one frontend, someone is watching TV, and you need to burn something.

3.) For the web GUI, I recommend PHP, if that's what MythWeb is using in SVN. I write PHP code for a living. It's not a bad language. And there's something to be said for consistency.

4.) Please include the ability to ORDER content on the DVD. With the current version I'm using, since it uses checkboxes, when you select 4 half hour shows they'll end up in an arbitrary order on the DVD. I'd like the ability to specify the order.

5.) Add the ability to edit the recording's title and description before burning. Sometimes I'd like to prefix the episode number, shorten the description, etc...

6.) I don't really know if this works or not yet, but I'd love to be able to burn an Mpeg-4 DVD with menus and everything, just like Mpeg-2 DVDs. I think these are called DivX DVDs. There's a certification for it, and certain commercial DVD players support it.

7.) Also, the ability to transcode from Mpeg-2 -> Mpeg-4 and vice versa would be very nice. I have both a PVR 350 (hardware Mpeg-2 encoder) and a Plextor ConvertX(hardware Mpeg-4 encoder). I'm currently loath to use the Plextor, even though the disk and bandwidth savings would be significant, because I can't use MythBurn to burn DVDs, but even if I could, I wouldn't want to be limited to DivX DVDs. (but I *would* want the option for speed/quality's sake)

8.) Please keep the DVD backgrounds, music, menus and submenus! And yes, the submenus are useful when you want to jump quickly to a scene. Perhaps they should be renamed "Scene Selection"?

9.) I also would like the ability to burn videos to DVD.

Hmmm.... I think that's it for now.....

_________________
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Jesse Guardiani
Programmer/Sys Admin
jesse@wingnet.net

Thanks for all your comments and lengthy posts. I've not got time to reply to each individual but I've taken note of your favourite features and will try and include everything I can.

The web interface will stay, but mythweb (under v0.19 of mythtv) keep changing on an almost daily basis so its difficult to keep up with that!

I'm hoping that the interface will become much easier going forward, perhaps a "simple" and "advanced" type arrangement.

If your using v18.1 of myth then have a look at mythburn-ui - this is a native plugin for mythburn. Works fine and you dont need to leave the frontend!

most of what I'd like to see has already been mentioned, except for a bit more flexibility in terms of 4:3 and 16:9 aspect ratios.
Uk dvb streams come in both 16:9 and 4:3 aspect ratios, the existing mythburn scripts default to 4:3, there's no ability to detect the aspect ratio and burn accordingly.
It's not entirely trivial since in a program broadcast at 4:3, commercials will still be at 16:9, but it would probably be safe to assume that if 4:3 was present then it would be the program, and commercials (if not cut) would be distorted.
see http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=8294
for more of my thoughts on this one.

Great work on the last version, looking forward to the new,
much appreciated.
Jim.

I'd like an option to burn large files across multiple disks. Instead of taking a bitrate hit by tcrequant, allow the option to keep the original bitrate, but spread over 2 or more .iso files, or burn to 2 or more dvds... otherwise, a great addition to mythtv.- thanks to all who contribute. thanks, Mike

spit,
What is your current focus? Starting a ground-up rewrite in Python (or another language) or stabilizing the current bash solution?
I would opt for gradually starting to rewrite which would allow for more features like disk splitting and such. Using bash, it would become a lot of work for more functions, IMO.
Again, I offer my help in writing the new version.
Etnoy

I just installed MythBurn from CVS onto a MythTV 0.19 system. A job just failed because it couldn't find the NUV file. I realised this error occured because the files I wanted to burn to DVD were located on my slave backend machine, not the primary backend.

So my feature request would be to enable MythBurn to be network aware such that files can be found no matter which backend machine has them.

Two other requests. Firstly, it would be nice to have a show filter on the MythBurn web page so that only episodes of the desired show are listed instead of having to wade through every recording to find the right ones.

Secondly, I would like to be able to specify the size of the DVD image to adjust tcrequant. It just made a 3.7 GB ISO image from 5.5 GB of files; that's about 1 GB of unused DVD space that could have been used for a greater bitrate. Or am I off the wall on this one?

And finally, thank you very much for developing this fine utility. I greatly appreciate your efforts.

--
Cheers,
Rob

Another option I would like to see is a "Force Overwrite of DVD-RW Media" that passes the -use-the-force-luke option to growisofs when selected to allow DVD-RW to be re-used (or alternatively, just pass it always so that it will overwrite by default).

I did submit a patch to allow ordering of episodes and to select which aspect ratio you wish to burn, but for some reason these were ignored.

A full tarball can be found here: http://www.mythbox.co.uk/mythtv.htm

Hope this is of some help!

steveybaby2
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4.) Please include the ability to ORDER content on the DVD. With the current version I'm using, since it uses checkboxes, when you select 4 half hour shows they'll end up in an arbitrary order on the DVD. I'd like the ability to specify the order.

Uk dvb streams come in both 16:9 and 4:3 aspect ratios, the existing mythburn scripts default to 4:3, there's no ability to detect the aspect ratio and burn accordingly.
It's not entirely trivial since in a program broadcast at 4:3, commercials will still be at 16:9, but it would probably be safe to assume that if 4:3 was present then it would be the program, and commercials (if not cut) would be distorted.

Spit2k1, thanks so much for Mythburn. I've been using it successfully since you first released it (about 1 1/2 years ago I believe) and have several hundred DVDs all produced by it. I refuse to bother learning Windows DVD software because Mythburn is so simple.

I would like to second this request quoted above as I have at least half of my recordings on my slave backend and currently I have to manually move them to the master backend (and then delete the slave recording, add it back to the DB, mythcommflag rebuild it) in order to use Mythburn. I tried editing the scripts a year or so ago in attempts to get it to access the slave, but wasn't successful and gave up. So making it work as requested above with the recordings on a different backend (using the native Myth protocol) would be a very high priority request for me. Thanks again.

Steve

I'm just in the process of adding this to the new UI. You'll be able to choose what media you want to use (DVD-R Single Layer, DVD-R Dual Layer, DVD-RW, or file). If you choose DVD-RW there is an extra option to erase the media.

Is the -use-the-force-luke parameter used on its own or is there an additional parameter that follows it? The man page doesn't document any of these options.

Also do you know of an easy way to check what free space is left on a DVD-RW?

The -use-the-force-luke option is used on its own. My mythburn.sh has a line like this: Dont know the answer to your second question.

dvd+rw-mediainfo /dev/dvd

will give you the status of the dvd in the drive.

To all envolved in MythBurn:

GREAT addition to MythTV!. This is one of those reasons why open-source is a good thing.

I have found MythBurn to be invaluable to allow all my friends and family to share in the MythTV experience without actually having one in their homes (which is good, because I would be maintaining them all, 24/7). The ideas thus far all echo my own thoughts on how I would change MythBurn if I had the skills. I am a DVD authorer/graphic designer by trade and know that there is ALOT more potential for the standard, but am not sure how far the Linux authoring tool goes, so please forgive my ignorance!

1) I like the idea of more control over the title/description/info listed on the menus. I think it would be a great idea to have 2 buttons for each menu item - one that plays the item, one that goes to an item menu that can give chapter markers, or detailed info about the show.

2) The option for a "Play All command" on a multi-episode menu.

3) I second (or third, or fourth...) the idea of being able to order the menus however the user likes.

4) Option to auto-sort the menu items by original air date (this will only work for shows that have their info filled in by Zap2It, but would be cool)

5) Full motion backgound option

6) Transistions between menus and menus or menus and shows

7) Themes are a good idea. I would be glad to help design a few themes if that is needed, but I will be next to useless with coding, let me know.

I am sure I will think of more, thanks for all the hard work!!!