I have a very stable R5.5 backend system that I do not want to ugprade. I'd like to run a Virtual R6 system on top of the physical R5.5 machine, I would use the R6 VM for transcoding to h.264 as my impression is that R6 has the latest needed codes.

Anyone tried to run something like this, and if so, any useful starting points? Thanks!

Marc

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Marc

The views expressed are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer.

Why do you want to hang on to R5.5? R6 is better all around.

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My System

It is A lot of work to upgrade my customizations. Will do it at some point.

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Marc

The views expressed are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer.

This...

I still run two 5.5 machines (out of six total...) because of this, and that they're bulletproof, so why mess with 'em .....

I don't do exactly that but I do run my Myth backends on VMWare without any issue. I use a slave backend to just do transcoding and commercial skip processing as well.

R5.5 is more or less debian based and VMWare does support debian so it should work. Best to just try it and see.

The only issue to watch out for is ensuring you don't have a conflict with say two master backends. IIRC myth 0.23 has an auto discovery capability.

Now if all you want is transcoding, you might only need to run the transcoding task (mythtranscode) or even mencoder which may simplify things. I'm just not sure what you are transcoding and where you want them to end up or how automatic you want it to be.

If all you want is to take mpeg and convert to h.264 then you should be able to obtain the latest mencoder/mplayer and write a simple script to do the work for you thus avoiding the VM/R6 work.

Christ, I already have a script that uses mencoder to convert mpeg2 to XVID. I want to cut over to H.264. I tried using the ffmpeg command from one of the mythexport profiles and it failed on R5.5. It will work with a tweaked mythbuntu 10.10 install. My impression is that the codecs and version of ffmpeg in R5.5 are fairly old and that I need newer versions. My concern is that if I upgrade them that I might break something else on my system. I also suspect there are a lot of dependencies required to get ffmpeg and the codecs properly upgraded. If there is an safe and easy way to upgrade the h.264 codecs and ffmpeg, please let me know -- it would be very useful and I could give this a try.

I attempted an upgrade -- it failed very quickly during the install -- I've started another thread on that at http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic. ... 768#130768

Thanks for the replies and any help anyone can provide!

Marc

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Marc

The views expressed are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer.

If you're comfortable compiling from source, you can compile a new mplayer/mencoder (plus other important dependencies like x264) and install somewhere different from your current installation (/usr/local, /opt, or even your home directory, for instance). I reckon you should be able to have two independent versions of the stuff you need: one for your transcoding and one for everything else if you're careful about it.