[mythtv-users] Bitrate oddity

[f-myth-users@media.mit.edu]

    > Date: Thu, 19 Jan 2006 21:40:17 +0000
    > From: Nick <knowledgejunkie at gmail.com>

    > On 19/01/06, f-myth-users at media.mit.edu <f-myth-users at media.mit.edu> wrote:
    > > Still looking for suggestions on easy ways to either reencode what
    > > I've already got at slightly lower rates, or to cut it in ways that
    > > will not be too difficult..

    > For cutting that works, I always recommend ProjectX, a Java app.
    > However there is a lot of work going on to get exporting/transcoding
    > from within MythTV working without the associated audio sync problems
    > that can occur.

    > To simply reduce the size of an MPEG2 file, you can use tcrequant to
    > requantise the video stream without having to reencode the whole
    > thing. It's very useful if your recording is slightly too big to
    > author to DVD, as it takes only a few minutes to work its magic,
    > whereas reencoding could take a long time. tcrequant is part of the
    > transcode project/package.

Well, I just had a total bombout on both ideas.  I'm running Unbuntu
Breezy, in case anyone has any suggestions.  What follows are sketchy
summaries; if someone wants more details to help debug, I can include
precise versions and transcripts from my Emacs shell.

ProjectX won't run, regardless of whether I compile it myself or use a
premade jarfile I found on doom9; I'm using free-java-sdk.  For the
one I compiled myself, doing "java -jar ProjectX.jar" blew out just
after saying "Loading Basic Classes..." saying it couldn't load the
AWT toolkit: gnu.java.awt.peer.gtk.GtkToolkit.  So I installed
libcj6-awt and reran it, whereupon it printed "Loading Basic
Classes..." and then simply printed "Aborted" with no other output
and no clues at all as to what went wrong.  The premade jarfile I
got blew out claiming it couldn't resolve the class
net.sourceforge.dvb.projectx.common.Start, even though I grabbed the
"src" directory from the version I compiled and put it in the same
place in the tree I got from unzipping the premade jarfile's zipfile.
Maybe it's some classpath thing; I dunno.

Meanwhile, the Breezy .deb for transcode -appears- to be just fine,
but running "tcrequant -i inputfile -o outputfile" simply segfaults
after outputting 17meg of a 290meg testfile (generated straight from
one of my PVR-250's at 4500 kbits/sec).  And the binary is stripped,
so gdb is no help; I'll have to dig up the source and compile myself
and then see if it segfaults again and if so, where.  (And by the
way, is there -any- documentation for tcrequant besides running it
with --usage and getting really unhelpful stuff like "-d mode
`verbosity mode'" with no other explanation?  It has no manpage,
transcode's manpage doesn't even mention it, and I can't seem to
find a manpage or documentation on the web.  Documented only in its
source perhaps?)

Does anyone else running Breezy have working versions of either of
these two programs?  Otherwise, I'll have to go in and debug one or
the other of these messes...

Tnx.