Greetings.

I am trying my best to transcode some recordings I've made on my R5C7 mythbox. The mythbox I have is fairly slow and is having problems transcoding the video (last attempt died after ~29 hours of operation). So, I figured I'd try my other computer. I also don't want to have a keyboard in my living room to do the commercial cropping, so I'd prefer to run the frontend on a different machine for that purpose. I don't have another computer to install the frontend on, but I can use the live CD. Only, when I do that, while I can watch live TV and any of my recorded programs, I can't seem to edit them on the remote frontend. Any ideas?

Also, I have a problem doing the actual transcoding with the LiveCD. First, though, a little background: I have a hauppauge 350 tuner card in a 1.3 GHz machine with 256 MB RAM for my mythbox. I run both the backend and frontend on this machine, which is hooked up to the TV via the 350's TV out dongle. Myth tv recordings are in the /myth/tv folder and have .mpg filename extensions. When I copy these files over to my MS Windows box (2.8 GHz Pentium D with 1 GB RAM), they will not play in any medai player, despite the fact that I have all the direct show filters and other whatnot installed. On that machine, I have an A/V transcoding program which identifies the .mpg file as containing ~ 1.2 seconds of video, which is consistent with the video output I see when trying to play the file in WMP. Interestingly, WMP will play all 2 hours of the recorded program's audio.

Anyway...so I grab the R5C7 install CD and run it in Frontend mode on the MS Windows machine. I use the SMB shares from the backend machine to mount the /myth partition from the backend machine. I also set up a symlink at /ramdisk/tmp to point to /myth/tv (nuvexport seems to expect the file to be transcoded to reside in /ramdisk/tmp). I also remove the /etc/myth/mysql.txt symlink and replace it with one that correctly specifies the backend IP (i.e. instead of localhost--curiously, the live CD frontend only option doesn't set this up properly for me).

From there, I try to nuvexport. Only it doesn't work because it seems the ffmpeg version in vanilla R5C7 is not compatible with the nuvexport that is included. Argh. Next, I repeat the whole process with R5D7, which seems to have better synergy in this regard. Only, now the nuvexport program dies a horrible death when it tries to divide by zero--the value it seems to think is the recording's aspect ratio. So, I hack nuvexport to use a 4:3 aspect ratio and restart. Still, no joy with yet another now forgotten error.

So, then I remember that I had installed on the backend box an updated ffmpeg and nuvexport (to fix the incompatibility in the R5C7 release). I copy those source code files over to the /ramdisk partition on the liveCD frontend and recompile and install to /ramdisk/opt. After again editing nuvexport for the aspect ratio fix, I re-ran the transcode job (this time, with the added bonus of xvid output). This job, as far as I know, is still running, and I'm doubtful that it'll work...it's not updating the % complete, although it is using a lot of CPU to do the yuvdenoise task (side note: it's nice to see over 90% CPU utilization on multiple tasks simultaneously, isn't it?--although that happened only briefly). BTW: I have the output going to the SMB mount, /myth/tmp to be exact.

So, my question is this: why is this so hard and will it work? Are there alternatives you see that may help me out? Am I approaching this all wrong?

Not really a solution to the commercial cutting issue, but to get the files to play in windows download VLC Media Player. It'll play basically anything. Heck, you can even play .iso images of CDs/DVDs and ziped files with it.

_________________
"The amount of time needed to solve a problem is inversely proportionate to the complexity of the solution" -- Me

KM: R5.5
CPU: Athlon 3800+
Vid: nvidia 7300GT
Snd: Chaintech av-710
Tuner: PVR150
HD: 1000gb sata + 750gb sata + 500gb usb

Thanks for the pointer, Gibble. I wonder if the VLC player will install codecs with it that can be then used by the transcoding software I have? Maybe then, that software will recognize more than 1.2 seconds of video...I'll give it a shot when I get home from work. Ultimately, you see, what I want to do is archive to DVD the movies I'm recording on the myth box--preferrably without the commercials.

One thing I failed to mention before what that the MS Windows box is the one that has the DVD burner.

Ok, so it seems that transcoding with a LiveCD Frontend is working after all.

Here are all the steps I had to take to get this working with the R5D1 LiveCD. Before I started, I downloaded fresh ffmpeg and nuvexport files from the 'net and put them in a folder (/myth/tmp) on the backend machine.

* Boot from CD.
* Select run Frontend from Install/Upgrade menu.
* Fill in IP address to backend machine when prompted by installer.
* Exit MythFrontend when it finally comes up.
* In an Xterm, as root:
- move the symlink /etc/mythtv/mysql.txt to /etc/mythtv/mysql.txt.orig
- copy /etc/mythtv/mysql.txt.orig to /etc/mythtv/mysql.txt
- edit /etc/mythtv/mysql.txt.orig, changing the IP address of the backend from 127.0.0.1
- chmod +r /etc/mythtv/mysql.txt
* In an Xterm (not root):
- make the directory /ramdisk/myth
- use smbmount to mount your /myth folder from the backend machine to this directory
- set up a symlink at /ramdisk/tmp that points to /ramdisk/myth/tv
- make the directory /ramdisk/opt
- copy the ffmpeg and nuvexport sources from /ramdisk/myth/tmp to this directory
- build the ffmpeg and nuvexport programs, installing them to /ramdisk/opt
(don't forget to compile with all the codecs you want to be able to use)
(note: the make in this step can be done just once; each time you start a new LiveCD session, you can simply do the make install part)
- add /ramdisk/opt to the $PATH variable
- run nuvexport and output to /ramdisk/myth/tmp
- kick back and watch the transcoding job work

I've used this process twice now, so I'm confident I have all the steps. Your mileage may vary, of course.

Interestingly enough, the first transcoding job I tried was an Xvid job. The encoding seemed to work fine, running at over 30 fps! However, the output file was only 18 MB, which is clearly wrong for a 2h45m movie! I seem to recall reading something about buffering in an NFS discussion somewhere, so I'll look into that next. Of course, this file did not work at all in WMP.

I also encoded two movies to DVD using nuvexport. This job seemed to work just fine, producing two .mpg files of approximately the right size which opened up just fine in WMP. However, the video on these movies was horribly grainy. No clue on what happened there.

Anyway, in writing this, I suddenly recall that I totally missed trying the 'Burn to DVD' option in the mythfrontend application. I'll try that when I get home tonight. Also, I'll update later on the status of the Divx output jobs I started before I went in to work. They were proceeding much slower (~12 fps) than the Xvid encoding, so perhaps(?) there is less chance of some buffering/NFS/SMB issue.