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.)
You’ll have to forgive me – I don’t know how your whole set up works. Mind giving me the short version – in layman’s terms? :-)
The goals are really just to record stuff off of the TV cable, and either watch them later on, or record them to DVD for playback on a DVD player.
Recording the TV shows and movies is done by attaching the TV cable to a TV tuner card and using the appropriate capture driver (‘ivtv’ for my card) and software (MythTV). Using those, each movie or episode of a show gets recorded into a file in the MPEG-2 format.
Then I can either just keep the files on the hard drive and use MythTV to play them back later, or I can burn them to DVD. Since that’s a somewhat more permanent form, I’ll usually want to cut the commercials out of the file first, and that’s where the editor comes in. DVDs also have to meet certain specifications, so some extra steps are needed to convert the recorded and edited file into the proper DVD format, and that’s what ‘dvdauthor’ and ‘mkisofs’ do.
I’m not sure if that’s what you’re asking, it’s late and I’m tired… :-P
That’s exactly what I was asking. Thanks! :-) Huh. So no Tivo for you! ;-)