Kind of off-topic... Anyone experiencing lockups when using the scripts above to convert to avi? I run all my shows through mencoder and then watch them, but some of them will lock up the video and continue playing audio on my Archos. the video frame stays still (like you hit pause), but the audio continues. The file appears normally sized for the length of the show and the Archos says the file is 30 or 60 minutes in length. I haven't played the file on anything else, so I'll try that to rule out hardware malfunction.

Bret

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Bret A Schuhmacher

Okay, with a lot of experimenting I got it to work. I had to modify the script to add a line and replace a line

listing=$(cat files.txt)
for FILENAME in $listing

instead of
for FILENAME in 'cat files.txt'

Everything else worked as it was. Thank you very much for your help everyone. I'm super excited to be able to transfer recorded shows/movies to my Archos AV500. Maybe now I will spend some quality time on the elyptical machine at the gym

Hi Julie, Just a teeny point to note, which might be where you're having problems... to linux, there's a lot of difference between " ' " and " ` "

' starts/ends a string
` processes the command and returns the results

so in saying 'cat files.txt' you're getting exactly that, whereas you should have had `cat files.txt`

Hope this helps in the future

Matthew

Thank you very very much. Now it makes so much sense why it wasn't working. Didn't even notice the difference between the ` and the '. Knowing the difference probably would have given me an extra 3 hours of sleep the night I was working on that script.

So I just re-installed my mythsystem with R5D1. Formatted the drive and started over.

Now, I am trying to put my custom job back in and it looks like it works, the web interface shows it complete, but the file is no where to be found..

Here's the command:
The command is:
mencoder /myth/tv/%FILE% -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vbitrate=600:vhq:vqmin=2:vlelm=-4:vcelim=9:lumi_mask=0.05:dark_mask=0.01 -vop scale -zoom -xy 320 -oac mp3lame -lameopts abr:br=96 -o "/myth/video/%TITLE%-%SUBTITLE%.avi"

Any idea what might have changed to cause this??

OOOPS... Typo!! Helps to triple check..

Here is the correct line:
mencoder /myth/tv/%FILE% -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vbitrate=600:vhq:vqmin=2:vlelim=-4:vcelim=9:lumi_mask=0.05:dark_mask=0.01 -vop scale -zoom -xy 320 -oac mp3lame -lameopts abr:br=96 -o "/myth/video/%TITLE%-%SUBTITLE%.avi"

For future reference I had to look at mythbackend.log file for the info.

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Knoppmyth R5F27

So now I have a new problem... After upgrading to the new Knoppmyth, and setting up my conversion routine, so I can copy files to my PMP, I was flying today and couldn't play any of my recently recorded video.. WTF!!!

I just figured out what is going on.. The newest version of libavcodec sets the file type to FMP4, but my player would not recognize this file, so I had to force it to show as xvid, by adding the following flag to the end of the command -ffourcc XVID...

This link explains it better:
http://wiki.multimedia.cx/index.php?title=FMP4

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Knoppmyth R5F27

This solution worked well for me but does anybody know how to get it to work with unicode program titles? I'm just getting question marks for names for now.

Thanks

Just in case somebody out there ever has the same problem as me, here is my workaround for unicode support.

Save the filename as %STARTTIMEISO%.avi (adjusting the above userjob). Make a new script with the following line

mv /myth/video/"$1".avi /myth/video/""$1"-"`mysql -Dmythconverg -umythtv -pmythtv -Bse "select title FROM recorded WHERE starttime='$1'"`".avi"

and add the script as a new userjob and call it passing the %STARTTIMEISO% value.

It's a little roundabout but it works. (it's just using the starttime to match the program name)