[mythtv-users] ivtv, MythTV and DVDs

[Cory Papenfuss]

 	There are a few issues with this for someone cursed with 
perfectionism as I am:

> Try nuvexport and dvdstyler:
 	I use the former to export .sql and .nuv, and find qdvdauthor less 
flaky than the latter.

> I did a lot of reading of those howtos and found that they are all a
> lot more complicated than they should be. I wanted something where I
> didn't have to type every option to every command by hand.
 	Agreed.  Especially for something as ugly as transcoding and 
making DVD's with menus.  The GUIs for making menus on DVDs have come a 
fair bit in the past year.

>
> I used nuvexport with all the default options, set it to "DVD" and
> just hit go. It chugged for a few hours and gave me a .mpg.
 	In general, I'd rather not re-encode the video.  It's a "digital 
generation loss," and seems to exacerbate any A/V sync problems.  If I 
*do* transcode, it's generally for the purpose of resizing or trying to 
get better quality/bitrate with a 2-pass, denoised encode.  The 
"one-button" method doesn't give quite enough tweaking parameters to do 
that.

>
> I then started up dvdstyler, and with a little drag and drop, made my
> first sucessful dvd last night, complete with menus and background
> images. (The first three episodes of Comedy Central's Drawn Together).
>
> - Jeff
>
 	Great... it usually works without a hitch.  When there are hiccups 
in the stream, lots of programs in the chain that's used to produce the 
result break.  For the most part, the GUIs are just wrappers to the 
backend and work fine when the stream's perfect.  If there's a bad audio 
frame, the muxer dies.  If the PTS changes in the middle, the sync gets 
off... lots of badness can happen.

 	I've done a bit of searching for some "cleaner" apps, but haven't 
found TheOne yet.  There's a fair bit of extraneous gunk/padding/resyncing 
in the ivtv mpg streams as captured from the card.  For burning directly 
to DVD, it'd be nice to get rid of it.  Re-encoding often fixes, but masks 
the problem at the expense of quality loss and considerable computation.

 	To each their own... :)

-Cory

*************************************************************************
* Cory Papenfuss							*
* Electrical Engineering candidate Ph.D. graduate student               *
* Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University 			*
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