Sunday, December 14, 2008

Further improvements and fixes

After years of unsuccessfully trying to have the Myth backend transcode its MPEG2 recordings (provided by the Hauppauge PVR-150's onboard MPEG2 encoder chip) down to H.264 MPEG4s which consume only a quarter the disk space, I finally managed it.

The key seems to be not using any of the default Transcoder profiles and creating a new one which is specifically MP4 based; the two Autodetect ones don't do what I expected them to and the Low-Medium-High are RTJPEG rather than MP4 (the anal retentive in me refuses to change their definition).

Commercial detection is good; what I expected was that once a recording was commercial flagged, it would automatically insert cutpoints for future DVD export. This is not the case, but if I watch a flagged recording and hit M to edit it, once in the editor hitting Z imports the commercial flagpoints as cutpoints. Sweet.

The slave backend in the bedroom does not automatically configure itself to find the videos on the MBE; however, once NFS was configured for both boxes, the slave backend's ftab now mounts the MBE's ~/ at startup and the SBE's videos directory is pointed at it.

The master backend's media settings now include /media as a directory, so that CDs/DVDs/USB sticks with standard format videos can be recognized by Myth's video player. Irritatingly, Myth still has to be told to scan the media, and incomprehensibly does not filter out files outside the list of allowed media file extensions. It also does not purge the scans when the media is removed.

Burning shows to Memorex DVD+R single layer media has had spotty results: two DVDs made with Mytharchive have reported success, but had major bad sectors resulting in unplayability. Both were exported again as DVDs using identical settings successfully (as far as I can tell from casual scanning). I don't know if Myth is doing a crap job of verifying the media.

A problem since the box swap with Mythdvd not playing discs was resolved when the udev rules for optical media were discovered to have added the new box's optical drive but not removed the old one, effectively removing /dev/dvd from the device tree. Commenting out the old one and rebooting fixed this and Myth's default DVD player now works again.

Tuner card and audio card problems are still on the "to be fixed" list.