Mark,


You are talking about a little screen here, so no, two-pass encoding is not the only way. In fact, to remove the second pass, on line 113 comment out DoPassTwo();. Now run the script. If you like the quality, then you are set. You could also do a single pass and up the bitrate a bit. It is currently at 384, see line 21 $encodeopt. Change this to play with bit rate settings. The advantage to 2-pass is the file size get MUCH smaller in this situation. I am seeing a reduction of 40-65% on average between the first and second pass. But if you are only keeping these temporarily to watch on your iPod, and then delete, there is no reason why this would not work.

I will add an item to my todo list to add a 1-pass switch. That way if a user is running off a slower machine and only want to do 1-pass, they can pass --1pass to the script to bypass the 2nd.

Thanks for the comments.

From the command line i do /usr/local/bin/myth2ipod /myth/tv/ 1063_20051106003000_20051106010000.nuv
and it works. They show up in the queue, its just that they are perpetually "Queued" This is after all the commercial flagging jobs have long-since finished. They are non-transcoded files from a pvr-150.

What kind of permissions problem? /usr/local/bin/myth2ipod has a+x, and i can run the command from the mythtv user. Plus the dir is 777 just in case.

Is there a way to force-start the queue?

OK its working properly now. I went back throuhg and double checked every setting, turns out "Allow User Job #1" wasn't checked. So its all gravy now, baby baby.

Thanks for all the help!

Yeah, I get the same thing. I can run it from the command-line fine, but when it's a user job, it says it ran, but doesn't produce anything. I'm sure it's a permissions issue, but I haven't investigated yet.

EDIT: Turns out it was the same issue as mentioned above where I just didn't enable the User Job #1. Doh!

A minor issue: If a show title has an apostrophe in it, it will mess up the script. For example, tonight's Nova episode is entitled "Hitler's Sunken Secret".

So I added in a reg exp when setting up the filename (line 110-ish):

$filename =~ s/'//g;

Seems to have done the trick. FYI.

More Silly TV Show Titles

excerpt from my logs:
150559:mv -f /var/www/'Destinos:_An_Introduction_to_Spanish-Estoy_Harta!_(I'm_Fed_Up!)-20051110'.pass2 /var/www/'Destinos:_An_Introduction_to_Spanish-Estoy_Harta!_(I'm_Fed_Up!)-20051110'.ipod.mov
150560-sh: -c: line 0: syntax error near unexpected token `)'

It appears that more robust string scrubbing is necessary on the $filename variable. I'm no Perl wizard, or I'd offer do it myself. But, I bet there's a pre-exsiting regex/function/class that could solve this.

From what I hear, some people seem to be using mencoder (comes with mplayer) to convert .nuv files successfully. I came upon this page: http://www.terrencemiao.com/Webmail/msg00901.html
where he describes the syntax for mencoder. I tried encoding a file where mythtv has already transcoded out the commercials, and it seemes to work fine, although I don`t have a new ipod yet, so I can`t test if it actually plays properly on the ipod.

steff, I have been playing with nuvexport to try and get this working too. Honestly I have had zero time the last week, but hopefully this weekend I can get some of the changes made and the updates posted. Thanks for the report, and mencoder. I will give it a shot..

So have I Wififun, and actually, since my last post Ive been playing quite a bit with nuvexport as well.
After some time of research and testing, I really think that nuvexport is the way to go.

There is a .pm file (its like a plugin) for the iPod format for nuvexport at https://svn.forevermore.net/nuvexport/ticket/56
right now which works really well. (probably this will be standard in nuvexport in the future)
It adds an iPod export option to nuvexport, and Ive been investigating a bit on how to run nuvexport non-interactively using this config.

What Ive come up with is that nuvexport supports command parameters like this: This fits perfectly with the myth2ipod script (with only a very small modification).

The user jobs interface in MythTV provide the needed parameters to make it all work smoothly.
This works great on my system.

That leaves only one issue: the naming on the files from nuvexport. Per default nuvexport will name its output files like this %Programname%.mov but this could be altered to suit anyones needs by altering the settings in /etc/nuvexportrc or also handled in the myth2ipod script.

Here is a snippet from /etc/nuvexportrc:


I also hear rumours about a --out=blahblah.mov switch for nuvexport on the commandline, but I didnt get this to work on my build at least.

So there you have it.
And I must say (although I still dont have a new ipod) that the quality of the output files from this looks brilliant.

All this talk of nuvexport is bothering me . Please, don't use it, or at least keep the code modularized so I can alter it easily and use ffmpeg instead. Ever since nuvexport has been available, in all its various versions, I can never get the audio and video to sync up right. I still can't burn DVDs from my Myth recordings for that reason.

Using ffmpeg like myth2ipod does, it actually works perfectly, and everything is in sync.

Please, don't do it! Think of the children.

I use Debian unstable. My experience is that ffmpeg doesn't recognize the *.nuv files. (see compile configuration of ffmpeg below).

I also use nuvexport. It's a tool to export a TV show to DVD, divx etc. The nuvexport script also uses ffmpeg, but in combination with mythtranscode: mythtranscode sends raw video and audio, and ffmpeg reads from it. I tried to change myth2ipod script to also use mythtranscode, but I didn't know how to give the right time argument to mythtranscode (too difficult for me, new to perl).

I also tried to run mythtranscode with the -i $directory/$file argument, but mythtranscode doesn't work with it (probably a bug in mythtranscode). Mythtranscode seems to work only in the '-c <channel> -s <time>' argument for me.

Anyone can help changing myth2ipod to make it work with mythtranscode?


Configuration of ffmpeg on debian unstable:
--prefix=/usr --libdir=${prefix}/lib --enable-shared --enable-mp3lame --host=i386-linux --enable-gpl --build=i386-linux --enable-faad --mandir=${prefix}/share/man --enable-vorbis --enable-faadbin --enable-pthreads --enable-faac --enable-xvid --enable-dts cc --enable-amr_nb --enable-amr_wb --enable-pp --enable-shared-pp --enable-a52bin --enable-x264

Just a quick question for you:

First off... I'm really happy you guys are doing this! Bravo!

Second, do you plan on making this an actual plugin eventually for myth? It reminds me of Mythburn... I loved it, but I wish that it was added as an official plugin for myth. It we be really nice if you guys considered that route as long as Issac was up for it. I'm thinking "Mythpod" or as someone else suggested "Mythpodder". Any downsides to making it an official myth plugin or a script that's part of the official package?

Ok, the problem about setting the filename is now solved. I asked Chris Petersen about it, and he checked his code and found out that the parameter nuvexport require actually is --filename= instead.

So a working line for user jobs to ipod using nuvexport would for example be:


yay!

(stealthboy, dont despair - if it works for you now, then I wont force you to change yours to use nuvexport, I promise! )

Thanks to everyone for comming up with this solution. I have been using it for the past couple weeks and am thrilled with the results! Alas, now I want more <g>. Fast forwarding on the iPod is non existant so geting past comercials is tough (not to mention eating battery life). So now I would like to remove comercials before I send it over. I read the above posts about gettting the iPod.pm for nuvexport, which I did, but I can't find the directory its supposed to go in. Any help? I am running a basic R5A16 setup. Where is nuvexport anyway?

Please ignore. I downloaded nuvexport and installed it so now I have everything. However I dow wonder where to "put" this in the ipod2mpg script

I am very pleased with this project. Very nice . Still having trouble with titles with shows with ' in them tho. I added $filename =~ s/'//g; to myth2ipod but I am still having the same issue. bummer. hehe I guess no The Planet's Funnies Animals yet. ahh no real discomfort I guess I have several programs on the mac side that fix me right up. But if anyone has found a nice fix I would be glad to try it.