[mythtv] MPEG4 files

Michael J. Pedersen michael.j.pedersen at verizon.net
Fri Apr 11 19:31:04 EDT 2003


 >> It works for me. In fact, it works great for me. In fact, I've made 
 >>some
 >> code which does the majority of the work. I've got some cleanup I >>want
 >> to do first, and some more testing, and then I'm going to release it.

 >I would be quite interested in modifying the mythweb stuff to allow 
 >export of recorded films, either by clicking on the name of the >recorded
 >+file and getting a download, or possibly even as a streaming feed.
 >
 >Is your script in a form where I could take advantage of it to provide 
 >this functionality?  For example it seems to me that this might
 >+provide an easy way to effectively have a multi-client front end. 
 >Just record it, then on your windows machine stream it to media >player...
 >Thanks

I'd have to say no. I read this about 0630, and it's not 1807, and I've 
been pondering this a lot in the inbetween time. Problems that I can 
foresee with doing it:

    1) My script does a re-encode of the stream (and handles editlists 
in mythtv, allowing you to chop out commercials if you like). Big 
problem here is that, unless the machine can handle re-encoding in 
realtime, it won't be feasible.
    2) Network bandwidth could be real issue. On most LANs, it won't be 
a big deal (average file size for a 30 minute show without commercials 
is 240M), but over the internet could be a real issue for streaming.
    3) Finally, it goes through the file at least twice, and outputs no 
less than 1 file (and if there's a cut list, more likely it will be two 
or more files). The time for the first pass is counting the frames in 
the file (oh, and if anybody can give me a sub-second way of counting 
the frames, I'd appreciate it!), and the second pass is generating the 
re-encoded movie.

Having said that, it might be possible to re-work the script to do so. 
My setup won't handle this very well, though, since I've got an older 
Athlon with serious heat issues. I'm NOT going to be a good tester for this.

I think I've also finally found the source of one problem I've been 
having. I thought mencoder wasn't taking the end position properly, but 
now I think that mencoder was adding more frames due to the duplicate 
frames in the video stream. Has this been fixed with 0.8, does anybody 
know? Since it gets about 1 duplicate frame per second, it's been a most 
peculiar bug (making it look like mencoder is grabbing a number of 
frames equal to the number of seconds it copied as extra at the end).

I'm getting way off track here, so I'll turn sign off again.

Laters!



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