[mythtv-users] Save recording on DVD?

[Rod Smith]

On Sunday 10 August 2008 06:32:29 pm Brian Wood wrote:
> Mark Knecht wrote:
> >    I guess I'll need to learn about hand editing commercial breaks? Is
> > this difficult or error prone?
>
> I think you want to learn about "editing" in general, not specifically
> just commercial breaks.
>
> There are a lot of video editing programs available for Linux, from
> gopchop to Cinelerra, or from very basic to capable of creating a
> feature film.

MythTV has its own editing features. I don't recall the keyboard keypresses, 
offhand, since I do it using my remote.

> After the commercials have been flagged they then have to be actually
> removed from the file (edited out). The internal myth player knows how
> to skip the flagged commercials but nothing else in the world of players
> does. Normally you convert the commercial marks to cutpoints, then
> trandcode and remove them, then create your DVD.

It can be simpler than that. MythArchive has an option to honor cut points. If 
all you want to do is remove blocks of a recording, you can mark them in 
MythTV, set up the archiving, and the resulting DVD should be the edited 
version. (At least, that's the way it works in 0.20.2 -- I still haven't 
upgraded to 0.21.) I seldom use this feature myself; I generally do lossless 
transcodes because it takes me a while to get around to creating a DVD and I 
want to save disk space in the meantime, and/or I need to transcode to change 
the bitrate.

If you want to do something more complicated than remove commercials, like 
split a single recording up onto multiple discs or re-order a single 
recording, then you'll need more sophisticated tools.

> If you trust your commercial flagging it can be as easy as hitting a few
> keys and letting Myth convert the flags to cutpoints (an EDL in the
> vernacular, Edit Decision List). It rarely works out to be that easy
> though.

Commflagging is seldom 100% accurate, so at the very least the cut points 
should be reviewed to be sure you're not cutting out anything important.

-- 
Rod Smith