It will work over X though - not sure if you have X11 set up on your mac, but on my linux machine I run:

ssh -Y media
(then put in password)

Then you are logged into the mythtv box, and running mythsetup makes it appear on your screen.

In unix extra slashes (/) do not seem to hurt, eg /myth/tv/filename is equivalent to /myth/tv////filename, but of course both are different to /myth/tvfilename

therefore you are better to put in an extra / than to omit it.

A problem that you might run into in mixed environments is the line termination character. In unix it is <LF> (ascii decimal 10). In Windows it is <CR><LF> (ascii 13 followed by ascii 10) and in mac I believe it is traditionally <CR> - although whether this is still true in OS X (based on unix) I do not know.

And yes you have to be careful cutting and pasting out of a web page as odd characters do creep in. Someone needs to properly package these scripts and post a tarball or zip file on the web. When they have settled a bit I can do that if desired.

I am stoked so many are playing with this. Very cool!. Pegli has started a mythweb interface, and I hope to have some time this week to help on that end. I have been dusting of the cobwebs in the php part of my brain.

cortez, yea, they play great on the iPod. Actually that is where I started. The first thing was to find a ffmpeg mencoder line that outputted a playable file. Everything else built from there.

thelynches, soon I hope to get this centralized. I will see about setting up up some space and putting this in a downloadable format so that updates are always available, and no more cut and pasting. This should solve some of the other problems. UPDATE: i have setup: It should be up in a day or so, with the files.

rteichman, glad you got it working. The problems you have other than vlc, seem to be related to the cut and paste. You should not need the slash, but if it works for you, good. This was done in TextWrangler on a mac, so there should be little trouble, but I do use unix line feeds, not the old mac ones.

You should all be using the newest version .6 that outputs a php feed file, and individual xml intem files. This should be the final format, and any updates at this point on should not compromise any encodings you have done so far.

the script and install directions are up at:
http://myth2ipod.com/

Check out the change log for new features.

First, I have to say Great job with this! It really is very smooth when it comes to both myth and itunes. The script works brilliantly, and it generates the xml just fine, BUT:

ffmpeg however does not seem to recognize the format of MythTVs transcoded .nuv files.
I don't have a happauge-based hardware encoder card, but instead an ordinary saa7134 tuner card, so I use MythTVs transcoding to automatically reduce the .nuv files to manageable sizes, as well as to cut out the commercials from the files.

here's what happens when i try to encode using mpg2ipod (from mythbackend.log):



Even something as simple as this doesn't work:


I'm using ffmpeg from cvs.

Yea, I noticed this yesterday when I set a few older items to copy for the ipod. I had forgotten that I transcoded them, and they failed. Now that .8 is up with the changes it has, I will see what I can do to get a working ffmpeg line that will work with the transcoded files.

There are some slight differences in the filename conventions for the newer builds of Myth off of Subversion. The filenames no longer have the endtime, so the section of Perl that splits up the $start and $end vars are just a bit off. For the $start var you just need to add a substr() in the assignment to pull out the first 14 chars of $file[1]. FYI.

stealthboy, could you post a couple of the filenames for me please. Thanks for the input.

Sure:

1176_20051024011500.mpg
1122_20051027010000.mpg

It's the channid, then the starttime. No more end time.

Is there any way to detect a widescreen formated video and either add the black bars at the top or (preferably) chop / crop the width to 320 (4:3)? I am recording alot of hdtv shows and when I convert them using this script they playback squished because of the aspect ratio. The script squishes the 16:9 video into a 4:3 screen. I think because of the small screen just cropping the extra info on the sides of the video would be best instead of having black bars at the top and bottom.

Any update for the new mythtv filename formats yet?

Thanks,
James

James.. I do know what you mean. The widescreen stuff gets copressed on the sides, and the letter-boxed content gives up so much screen space to the black bars that on such a small screen it really stands out.
The quickest thing you can do, is create a copy of the script and call it something like myth2ipod.hd. Edit the $encodeopt variable and adjust the crop options. If it is true HD 16:9 content, then just crop the left and right a little more until you get what is acceptable. If it is letter-boxed content, then you need to crop the top, bottom, and the sides more. Then set this new script as a second user job, and run this one for your hd or letter-boxed content.
I am working on a way to detect the format, and give the user options for cropping and even cutting out the flagged commercials. Beta .9 will include a few bug fixes including the new filename fix, and 1.0 has some cool things on the todo list. .9 should be up Friday sometime.

chdir()

I get the feeling though that that isn't what you are asking judging by the level of perl code in the script.

OK I installed myth2ipod and can set it to run manually. I set up the user job, but it doesnt seem to activate the transcode - it just shows up in my mythweb status window as "queued" and when i run ps it doesnt show up.

the user job command i'm using is /usr/local/bin/myth2ipod "%DIR%" "%FILE%"

when you say you can run it manually, does that mean you can run it from the command line by giving it something like:
If that works, and ffmpeg does its thing, then I would guess the problem is permissions. There is a problem with transcoded files, and I think the script may only run on pvrx50 recordings. If you know it works from the command line, then the problem is either the mythtv user can not run the script or.... Um I just though of something. Running the script from the job queue literally puts it in the queue. So if you have anything else going before it, like commercial flagging, or your queue is scheduled to run at a certain time, then it will not show up right away. Check the backend status from mythweb to see if it has been added to the queue.

1) From what I udnerstand...files in the nuv container (i.e those generated by the mythtranscode daemon) will be a serious challenge. Best to turn off auto-transcoding for any programs you wish to myth2ipod-ize.

2) Permisssions will bite you in the a**. Get them sorted out with manual runs first, then automate it as a UserJob.

3) On another note, is two pass encoding the only way to get acceptable quality? I run a seriously underpowered mythtv backend and don't have a lot of cpu cycles to spare.

4) Thanks for script. As I get the kinks worked out, I plan to use it as my default archive method.

Mark