[mythtv-users] is mythtv smart enough to do this with recordings?

[Steve Hodge]

On 7/27/06, chris at cpr.homelinux.net <chris at cpr.homelinux.net> wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 26, 2006 at 03:03:52PM -0400, Michael T. Dean wrote:
> > On 07/26/06 14:55, Isaac Richards wrote:
> > >On Wednesday 26 July 2006 2:43 pm, chris at cpr.homelinux.net wrote:
> > >>If I was designing a PVR from scratch I'd seriously look at
> > >>recording in one-minute segments.
>
> > >And so force _everyone_ who wanted to watch a program recorded like that
> > >somewhere else to post-process their recordings so it's one file?  Yeah,
> > >that'd go over well.
>
> We already post-process to flag commercials.

I don't. Commercial detection does not work reliably in the country I
live in, or many others outside North America.

> We also have to
> nuvexport if we want to put a 2+ hour show onto DVD or put
> *anything* onto CD-Rom or iPod, etc.  What percentage of the Myth
> users dump their data directly onto another (non-Myth) machine for
> remote playback?

It's useful having a recording stored in a single file. Whether you're
just moving stuff round or transcoding or trying to fix some issue. It
used to be (0.18) that if the recording volume filled up MythTV would
lock up - the only way to recover (that I found) was to delete a
recording outside of Myth. That's the sort of thing that would be much
more difficult if there where thousands of 10-30MB files comprising
each recording.

> Does the fact that *some* people choose to bypass
> the front-end and play the media using other tools justify
> restrictions within Myth?

What restrictions? What exactly do you think you'd be achieving by
splitting recordings up that way? Or look at it this way: does your
expected added flexibility justify restricting people to Myth aware
tools for dealing with recordings?

> If you're going to have this as a design
> goal, shouldn't you be converting the data from other kinds of
> capture cards to mpeg as well so that everyone can bypass the Myth
> front-end?

Why? Recordings don't need to be mpeg to be usable outside the
frontend. There are patches for mplayer to handle nuv. There are
filters available under Windows to handle nuv.

> I don't use Xine to play back raw Myth content, so I don't know
> what the hiccups would be like.  Of course, my position is that
> Myth should be doing what works best for Myth, not what works best
> for Xine.  There are already ways to take Myth content and reformat
> it for use in external players.

My position is that Myth should be doing what works for the user. You
want to restrict the user's flexibility in ways that don't matter to
you. That doesn't mean they don't matter to others. I choose to do my
transcoding and DVD authoring under Windows. You want to make that
process more difficult. I don't want to have to run some "export"
process on my Myth box just to access the recordings from my Windows
desktop when I can currently do so simply by sharing the directory
over the network.

> If you used nuvexport to prepare your shows for transfer (like
> those of us who use iPod, CD-Rom or DVD to take shows on the road)
> then you wouldn't have to copy and playlist 2400 files to see your
> 4 hour show.

But you will have to wait for nuvexport.

Steve