[mythtv-users] Transcoding on a non myth machine

[Chris Pinkham]

> (a) The SBE's mythtranscode was getting handed myth:// "URLs" instead
> of just a pointer into the filesystem, then complained that it didn't
> support that mode.  Jobs on the MBE ran fine, but that meant that some
> random proportion of them would just error out and die.

In 0.18.x, the myth:// URLs are given if myth can't find the recording
in the same directory path on the local backend as it is on the backend
that recorded the file.  In SVN, myth will also check the local
backend's RecordFilePrefix directory for the file and use a local
filename if it exists there, otherwise it falls back to the myth://
URL.

> (b) It then left all the errors in my job queue for some long period
> of time and nobody could figure out how to actually make them go away.
> (They appear to have all vanished 8 days (yes, not 7) after erroring,
> spontaneously; is there some week-and-a-day timeout somewhere?)  This
> was apparent from reading the backend logs, since I've got both
> backends and the frontend logging to files to "-v" and have since
> about 6 weeks ago.

I thought we went over this.  The 8 days is because in 0.18.x, errors
are kept around for 7 days and the cleanup job only runs once a day,
so the jobs could be around for almost 8 days depending on when they
ran and when the cleanup job ran in the housekeeper.  In SVN, this
has been shorted from 7 to 4.  I think you could still have deleted
these jobs from the mythfrontend status screen though by using the
popup menu on an errored job.

> (c) The resulting transcoded files had -VERY- low audio levels, and I
> couldn't find any way of making them at least match the originals.
> (My recordings in general -also- have low audio levels, despite
> setting ALSA mixer levels high; is there some way of convincing 250's
> and 350's to record louder?  I'm comparing to the TV itself and all
> the other devices which share the cable feed, none of which have this
> problem.)

There is a volume control for ivtv compatible cards right in the
recording profile editor.  This has been there since the ivtv
support was added to Myth.

-- 
Chris