Andrew: I was following your directions and came to the point where I had to install subversion. You made the note about the "scary" ness of this step as it was going to install locales plus gave me the warning about the gcc switch.

I recalled xsecret's post about adjusting sources.list to avoid problems. I did that, but then there's unresolved dependencies when trying to install subversion. It suggests "apt-get -f install" to resolve them, which results in its wanted to remove A LOT OF THINGS.

So I'm hesitant on which route to proceed with.

Yeah, that's a tough one. I did not change my sources.list from unstable to stable when I did my testing with x264. I had the "background image popup" problem that many folks have experienced but I used another approach to solve the issue.

The move to debian stable from unstable in theory should allow installation of troublefree debian packages but you are taking a chance in hosing your system by uninstalling a whole bunch of stuff that knoppmyth is dependent on.

My recommendation is to leave your sources.list at unstable and expect to have to fix the background image popup problem. Unintentionally uninstalling a bunch of knoppmyth packages seems doomed to failure and the fixes while keeping "debian unstable" seem to be known and easy.

I do not know if you can build MPlayer with x264 using the stable debian or not. I suspect you can but that's why this experimentation is important. There are just a lot of unknowns lurking around that need discovery.

I'd keep your sources.list pointed to unstable and just fix the fall out. I do not recommend doing this on a production machine with no backup in case things go terribly wrong. You may have to reinstall.

Andrew Lynch

Yeah, this would be on my production backend machine, so I don't think I'll proceed until the whole sources.list thing gets sorted. Thanks.

Andrew, thank you for posting that great instructions, and your experience with getting this to work. I followed this with both R5A16 and now A22, and it worked flawlessly. I think I ran across your posts to the x264 mailing list while looking for more information.
For me h.264 is the route I want to take in archiving movies and HD content. As well as getting content onto my iPod with video. This has been a great start.

Thanks! That's great H.264 is working for you. x264 is maturing rapidly and I believe this is the way of the future as soon as they release a stable version. Xvid is a great codec but x264 has the potential to be much better with better quality and smaller filesizes.

If you have some small "before and after" video samples, please post! Thanks!

Best of luck!

Andrew Lynch

The mpg2avc script will be in the next release.

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cesman

When the source is open, the possibilities are endless!

Is Memcoder already part of Knoppmyth or must it be downloaded, compiled and installed?

Are there any special steps for setting up Memcoder and loading the codec conversion engines?

Will the new version of Mythtv 0.20 have h.264 transcoding installed and working right out of the box - no assembly required?

_________________
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

Read this whole post and didnt see a mention of watching LIVE hdtv.

I live in the UK and want to watch the BBC HD stream, when I select it Myth dumps out with an unable to decode video error.

Has anyone got BBC HD working in Myth yet?

yes. With myth 0.20 it works: I can record it, and play it back. It also works live.

However, the frontend playback requirements are fairly extreme. I am running an amd64 sempron 3000+, with a 6200 AGP card, and I can play it back, but at about 1/4 speed. Great to play with, useless to watch

This post has nothing to do with watching Live HD. It is about converting a recorded HD to h.264.

_________________
cesman

When the source is open, the possibilities are endless!

Since it's been over 1 year since this thread started, I wonder if it's still necessary to update memcoder with svn, in order to get the h.264 conversion to work? I'm afraid that using svn will break and screw up my R5D1 installation (still running R5D1 Myth 0.19).

I have recently updated mplayer to the latest version and codecs. Perhaps this is enough?

==== 12-16-06 update ====

Yes, the current version of MPlayer and MEncoder work fine with h.264 transcoding. I just modified one of the scirpts from this thread and transcoded a section of the the recently transmitted HDTV rescan of Rudolph The Red Nosed Raindeer from 1080i HDTV into a 1080 h.264 AVI file with a bitrate of 5000 kb/s, with AAC audio - per the h.264 standard.


It looks pretty clean, but the audio lags the video and seems to get more and more out of sync as the clip progresses.

_________________
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 getting an error with this script and R5E50.

Opening video filter: [scale]
VDec: using Planar YV12 as output csp (no 0)
Movie-Aspect is 1.78:1 - prescaling to correct movie aspect.
SwScaler: using unscaled yuv420p -> yuv420p special converter
FATAL: Cannot initialize video driver.

I'm using this version with R5E50.

for file in $*
do
mencoder -ovc x264 -x264encopts pass=1 -nosound -o $file.x264.avi $file
mencoder -ovc x264 -x264encopts bitrate=2200:pass=2 -oac copy -o $file.x264.avi $file
done

I also though R5E50 was going to have the mpg2avc script built in?

Dwaine

It's the new internal player that's the issue. If you move the video file over to the video section and use mplayer, it will play back great.

Fixed it for me.

Dwaine

Really ?

What frontend are you using.... this is BBC HD we are talking about ?

eeh maybee we need to take his to a more appropriate thread ....

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Duron1600 PCChips M848A
1Gb DDR400, 160Gb+160Gb+320Gb PATA HDD,320Gb USB2 HDD
Technisat DVB-T, 2x Skystar2 DVB-S 13,19,28.2 East

Using R5E50.