Bulk Transcoding Recordings

[sub]

Yes, possibly. Comskip is frame number based, so you'd have to try to keep the frame rate the same after conversion.

[nitrogen_widget]

I just run comclean on everything.
It gives me a slightly smaller file that gets even smaller should I want to convert it to xvid.

Then I don't have to worry about comskip while playing.

But I have a dedicated media server running GBPVR & use either an MVP or another GBPVR system to watch my recordings so comclean may not be practical for the person who has their unit in the living room & uses it for live TV.

[Mysteryman]

it doesn;t need to. if gbpvr doesn;t find the mpeg, it will check to see if there is an avi file there instead.

Dang! That sub is one clever guy!

As far as Dirmon, has anyone used this from a remote machine with a network share to the GB-PVR machine? If I have a low speed (quiet) machine as the GB box, and a dual proc machine elsewhere on the network, can Dirmon do the transcoding across the network (Gig Eth) leaving the few CPU cycles for the GB box?

[-stattik-]

Dang! That sub is one clever guy!

As far as Dirmon, has anyone used this from a remote machine with a network share to the GB-PVR machine? If I have a low speed (quiet) machine as the GB box, and a dual proc machine elsewhere on the network, can Dirmon do the transcoding across the network (Gig Eth) leaving the few CPU cycles for the GB box?

Dirmon works fine from a network connection. It's how I have mine set up.

[Koenie]

Sub, Ommina,

The not lining up of commercials happens sometimes to me too. No idea what could cause it but I do see that mencoder sometimes reports that it has skipped black or identical frames, however the number of frames is quite low and would account for no more than a few seconds where the out of time comskip is rather minites.

Further the not picking up the comskip file happens when an mpeg has been played before (hence there is an xxxxx.mpg in the playposition database). When i then just stop playing and restart there is teh xxxxx.avi in the database then the comskip file is picked up...

I read in the mencoder manual that there is an option not to skip anu frames. I will activate that and see waht happens.

Ommina for your knowledge the behaviour talked above in this treat is not different in the latest version of comskip. I had this when running the 96 version also.

[Ommina]

Well, I am continuing to poke at this little concern.

I found this little tool (free) for displaying the frame rate of an AVI. For my post-mencoder avi files, it is reporting 23999, which, I assume, corresponds to the "-ofps 24000/1001" parameter of the mencoder command line.

I have yet to be able, though, to find a similar utility to get the frame rate of the pre-transcoded MPEG2, for comparison. Ideally I would like to find one that also uses the Directshow API and will give the numbers for both the MPEG and the AVI. If anybody has any suggestions on this count, I'd be most appreciative.

Koenie - interestingly, the missing / misaligned also seems to appear even if the database is already updated to point to the ".avi" (indeed, I get the impression that gbpvr is monitoring the recordings directory and updating the database as soon as the MPG file is deleted). So I don't think that the misbehaviour is directly related to the "replaying" of a file.

But... I could be wrong!

[HtV]

http://www.videohelp.com/tools?toolsearc...orfeatures=

[Ommina]

OK, no more bumping this thread after this post, I promise. I did, though, want to post the two resolutions I found for the original question, on the off chance somebody stumbles across this thread via search.

I'll create a different topic for the misaligned comskip frames.

Anyway, for the Bulk Transcoding:

Stakkik's batch file combined with dirmon worked very well for this. There was some minor batch file edits, and a bit of fussing with Dirmon to make it go, but once set up it behaved well. Gbpvr did indeed notice that the .mpg file was replaced with an .avi by a third party.

I used this for a dozen or so recordings and results were strong. I was somewhat concerned by posts on the Dirmon forum that said it might start the execution of the target batch file before the recording was completed. (This problem may have been fixed, I couldn't tell.)

Also, unless you also want the 'autocut' feature of Stakkik's script, it might be a bit much to setup. Still, a rough walkthrough is available, and it is all GUI based.

My final solution is marginally more technical and may go somewhat against sub's recommendations, but it is working very well for me, so I'll share.

If you are comfortable with inserting records directly into gbpvr's database transcode_queue table, gbpvr will (or, at least, my version will) notice and happily start transcoding the file as if it had inserted it itself. This let me setup config.exe to do the type of transcoding I wanted, which captures new recordings as they come in, transcoding both past recordings and future.

The downside is you need to be familiar with making changes directly to the database (either Access or the new version, depending on your own setup). Further, there is no promise that gbpvr's behaviour in one version will be the same in later versions.

While I suppose a small utility could be written to facilitate the process for the less technically inclined, I doubt the need is so widespread as to be worth the trouble.

But it worked a treat for me. And, best I can tell, it only has about a six week backlog of transcoding now...

Thank you to everyone who helped!