Right now, MythTV is recording an episode of Rome for me. But at the same time, a transcode job is in the middle of converting some other shows to MPEG-4 to free up some disk space.
I don’t know what’s wrong with me that my idea of amusement is to keep checking the amount of free disk space every few minutes just to see which task is ‘winning’…
With the news that Warner Bros. is dropping its support for HD-DVD and producing Blu-Ray discs exclusively from now on, the HD format war is pretty much over and Blu-Ray is the winner. The only major HD-DVD supporter left is Universal, and it’s unlikely they’re going to want to stay on a clearly losing side.
It’s actually a good thing that one side is finally gaining a dominant upper hand, since otherwise it was poised to be another VHS-vs-Beta war all over again, and the confusion would have kept people away.
The larger war is still only half-won though, as Blu-Ray still has to convince people to choose it instead of, well, plain DVD. People already get tons of extras and what they think is a decent-looking picture with DVDs, so is the higher resolution alone going to sway them into buying new players and more expensive discs…
(Maybe I won’t regret getting a PS3 after all.)
The feature list for the Fall Dashboard update for the 360 is out now, and the big new feature that’s got everyone abuzz is support for DivX/Xvid codecs.
That is indeed awesome, but upon reflection, it doesn’t really do *me* much good. My MythTV frontend is a bit flaky right now and I’d prefer something better, but the 360 can’t stream from MythTV right now regardless of what format the video is in. Other streaming solutions exist, but would require transcoding the video on the fly, which degrades video quality. But, I don’t really want to watch TV on the LCD monitor it’s connected to right now anyway.
The PS3 is in a better position, being connected to the bigger TV and it’s already close to being able to stream from MythTV; it sees the server, but says that the video files are corrupt (choking on the MP2 audio stream, perhaps). DivX support is coming to the PS3 as well, but it’s not clear yet if that will include Xvid as well. But wait, even if it did, I’d have to transcode my MythTV files to Xvid (which is actually easy enough), but then they’ll be stored in a Nuppelvideo container format that neither the PS3 nor 360 will support. Sigh.
One of these days I’m just going to have to tear down my entire home theatre setup and rebuild the whole thing from scratch…
It’s only a little over three months after building my new systems, including the heavily-upgraded MythTV box, and it’s already at 97% full on the video recording partition. Yikes!
Fortunately it’s just because I’ve been careless, and I can free up a lot of space, I just have to get around to working on it. There’s some backup data I was temporarily keeping on there that can be removed now, which would free up around 180 gigs. I can still try to use LVM to join it with another unused partition (the ‘extra’ space on the unexpectedly-larger refurb drive I got that couldn’t be added to the RAID set), which would add another 250 gigs. I can start transcoding shows into MPEG-4 now that there’s a more powerful processor in there and it won’t take all day to do so, which would halve the space used by recordings.
Or I could get around to actually watching these shows. I think I’m about 13 episodes behind on Lost now…
I didn’t even know about today’s announcements from Apple until I saw a “hey, it’s starting” forum post somewhere. The cases and Hi-Fi are kind of underwhelming and are really just more expensive and underperforming accessories.
The new Mini is a bit more interesting to me though. I’ve been thinking of putting together a home theatre PC for a while now, and this Mini slides into that role fairly nicely. The only sticking point is that it still doesn’t have video capture built-in, so it wouldn’t entirely replace my MythTV server, but it could act as a front end to it. It’s also not clear if it’ll be quite powerful enough to decode HD video, but that’s more of a future concern and there are still a bunch of other unsolved problems surrounding HD anyway.
Then it’s just a question of whether a home theatre computer is worth the cost…
When I’m recording movies with MythTV, one of the things I have to watch out for is that the bitrate is appropriate. A higher bitrate means better quality, but if it’s too high, it takes up too much space and might not even fit on a DVD. You need a balance, but sometimes it’s not so easy to get.
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This is a stack of the DVDs I’ve burned so far since I started using MythTV, most of which are movies I haven’t seen yet or don’t care strongly enough about to buy the official releases (and it’s actually missing a handful I’ve lent out or forgot to include).
Now if only I could find the time to actually start *watching* them…
Although I have a working process for recording and burning DVDs, I was still a little unhappy with some of the steps. In particular, ‘replex’ is apparently picky about audio stream headers and would often complain or crash if it couldn’t detect things the way it wanted to. When editing out commercials, I’d often have to experiment with different starting points for the first cut until ‘replex’ was finally happy.
Fortunately I finally got around to trying avidemux as an editing tool, and it’s made things much easier. Instead of marking off the sections you want to keep, as in ‘gopchop’, you mark sections to cut out and it applies the cut immediately, which makes it easier to see how the final result flows. It can requantize MPEG video to shrink it a bit, which is useful when I accidentally record a long movie at a high bitrate and it winds up slightly too big to fit it on a DVD. And, it’ll reindex the MPEG stream and insert the navigation packets, which means I no longer need to use ‘gop_fixup’ and ‘replex’ at all — ‘dvdauthor’ will directly accept the stream avidemux produces.
Now the whole process is simply:
1) Record the show with MythTV.
2) Load the recording into avidemux, edit out the commercials, and resave it.
3) Run dvdauthor and mkisofs to create the ISO image, and burn it to a disc, same way as before.
(Edit: Except that the title I tried it on tonight wound up with a/v sync problems… Bah. Back to the old method for now.)
It took a bit of fiddling, but I finally have DVD menus working for the TV shows I’m capturing. There are tools available for putting together the menus interactively, but I wanted something a bit more automated, and it’s not like I’m going to spend a lot of time carefully painting beautiful pictures for each one.
Now I can finally start burning TV episodes, since I didn’t want to have them all as one big stream where you’d have to fast-forward or rewind to the right starting point…
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In the previous chapter of our saga, I was still trying to find a method of making the MPEG-2 streams DVD-compliant without re-encoding, and I think I’ve finally got it.
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Having now successfully burned a handful of DVDs, a few things are becoming clearer:
(Yes, I know, you’re probably getting sick of these video-related entries by now :-P)
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I also finally got the replacement video card I had been waiting for, and now I can say that the PVR is truly complete. The TV-Out works fine, with no colour problems, and there was even an unexpected performance boost. The old card didn’t support the XvMC library for the Nvidia drivers but this one does, and CPU usage during playback dropped from 80-90% down to 45-60%, making playback smooth even with other stuff going on in the background.
Now at last I can just sit back in the easy chair with the remote and treat it like just another appliance, and not just a tacked-on feature of the computer. Even if it really is…
I think I’ve finally got a complete workflow for burning recorded programs to DVDs now:
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Yay, my DVD burner drive arrived today. Except that I don’t have any videos properly DVD formatted for burning yet. Or any discs to burn them to. Or any software to burn them with, since it’s an OEM drive… I think I was expecting to do my burning in Linux, like I did with all my CD burning, but then I wiped the system and didn’t reinstall Linux…
Oh well, it’ll get sorted out in time, and I needed a new CD drive anyway. My old HP 9900ci was getting flaky — it couldn’t even reinstall Battlefield 1942 without randomly failing partway through, so I had to mount the discs on the Linux server, copy the files over, and install them all straight from the hard drive.
I wound up getting a dual-layer-burning drive anyway, even though I wasn’t specifically holding out for one. The dual-layer media’s still expensive right now but should hopefully drop, this drive got great reviews, and it was still dirt cheap at just over $100 CDN, so what the hell.
And I don’t even have enough space for my existing DVD collection… :-P
I seem to be falling behind a bit in my TV-watching. Which is okay; the whole point of having the PVR is to let me watch things when I have the opportunity and not by a fixed schedule, after all. Except that I’m already running out of disk space…
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There is actually one other reason I wanted to move the SBLive into the server. I hate to leave a project unfinished, and so, the battle for computerized TV is on again…
The one major missing piece when I last left off was the TV tuner card, and a quick trip solved that. So, does it work? Well, sort of…
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During a lunchtime chat, a coworker mentioned that he’d managed to get his own homebuilt PVR set up, and it got me wondering…
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All I wanted to do was convert some clips… I’ve collected a number of little bits of video over the years, but they’re sometimes a bit of a pain to deal with. They’re in a zillion different formats, have to be played back on the computer, are often too small on the monitor and don’t look good when blown up to full screen, and need something a bit faster than my 400 MHz Linux box anyway. (The other, faster one’s often in XP for games.)
Fortunately there’s an easy solution: Video CDs! Simply convert everything to MPEG files, burn them to CD, and I can play them on my DVD player instead.
It turns out that video is a bit more complex than I had anticipated…
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