ZBack2Back is released!

[zehd]

All right Guys here is the first release of ZBack2Back. As any good programmer does, I will give the disclaimer first...

ZBack2Back works simply and quickly, and tries not to destroy anything, unless it's been told to clean up, and only at the end of the process. Please understand that you are taking a risk, but it's the same risk I am taking daily. It's been up and running for a week and a half for me, and the logs show when it was invoked, what operations it performed...

Install.

Create a directory 'C:\Program Files\devnz\gbpvr\Third Party\ZBack2Back' Unzip the two files her into that directory...

Create a shortcut... start the program...

[ATTACHMENT NOT FOUND]

Click the 'more' button. Make sure that you have references to the GBPVR.db3 database, and the Mpgtx.exe program. It belongs to the Comclean Package, installed in the gbpvr directory... You won't need to MEncoder.exe just yet...

You'll notice that by default, 'Delete Temp files' is unchecked... I'm still a little nervous, and so even I don't have this on on my main pvr. But be warned if a program is 1.5 Gb in size, when your done with it, you have an extra temp file about the same size too...

Also adjust the number of seconds to pre and post pad a current file...

Install 2

Next you need to edit your PostProcessing.bat I have ZProcess deal with all my processing, but I haven't yet integrated ZBack2Back into ZProcess. Here are two examples of Post Processing.bat...

Code:

call "C:\Program Files\devnz\gbpvr\Third Party\ZBack2Back\ZBack2Back.exe" %1

call "C:\Program Files\devnz\gbpvr\Third Party\ZProcess\ZProcess.exe" %1 comskip auto

Code:

call "C:\Program Files\devnz\gbpvr\Third Party\ZBack2Back\ZBack2Back.exe" %1

call "C:\Program Files\devnz\gbpvr\comskip.exe" %1

How it works...

When every program is finished recording, it gets checked by ZBack2Back. First it loads it into the middle slot, and looks up in the database, what start and end times and what tuner it was recorded on...

Then it checks if there was show on the same tuner, preceding or following the current show...

If it finds any of a variety of test circumstances, it processes the file.

• x minutes of the beginning of recording 2 has been glued to the end of recording 1 => Recording 1 has a "padding-end".
  
• x minutes of the end of recording 1 has been glued to the beginning of recording 2 => Recoding 2 has a "padding beginning".
  

If there are no preceding or following recordings, it exits

And then, ZProcess or ComSkip or whatever can process the show like normal

It works well for me, but there is still about 1-2 seconds lost. This happened when GB-PVR stopped recording one show and started recording another...

Good luck. I will posting this post in the ZProcess Sub-forum and taking questions there...

[Koenie]

Hey Zehd,

This looks like a cool idea. (I personally dont need it since I installed multiple capture cards after WAF complaints about exactly this problem.) Maybe even something to take up in GBPVR itself!!!

[zehd]

Hey Zehd,

This looks like a cool idea. (I personally dont need it since I installed multiple capture cards after WAF complaints about exactly this problem.) Maybe even something to take up in GBPVR itself!!!

I wrote this after a few people, My wife especially complained. We had multiple tuners already. Still had back to back issues... Sub has already mentioned that it's not something worth the time investment...

[cginzel]

i guess i'm a little dense... i'm missing something here. can you explain the purpose of this application? i think what it does is handle shows that immediately follow one another recorded on the same tuner and because of the padding feature of GBPVR, some portion of one show shows up at the start of the second, so this application cuts that overlap and returns it to the prior recording?

[zehd]

i guess i'm a little dense... i'm missing something here. can you explain the purpose of this application? i think what it does is handle shows that immediately follow one another recorded on the same tuner and because of the padding feature of GBPVR, some portion of one show shows up at the start of the second, so this application cuts that overlap and returns it to the prior recording?

Not exactly. When there are shows adjacent to each, there is no padding. Therefore when the end of one show exists at the beginning of another show, ZBack2Back reclaims that piece...

[zehd]

I'm starting the wiki page...

http://gbpvr.com/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Utility/ZBack2Back

[cginzel]

so just to be clear, "It slices and dices the files" means it is post processing the files and copying some portion of the recorded show one way or another (end to the beginning or visa versa)? hmmmm... very cool!

[zehd]

so just to be clear, "It slices and dices the files" means it is post processing the files and copying some portion of the recorded show one way or another (end to the beginning or visa versa)? hmmmm... very cool!

Yes that's right. I think my other utility, ZProcess suffers from a very long winded wiki page. I'm trying to make ZBack2Back a little easier to read.

I may actually include a detailed description of what it does in the background exactly, but that might be later...

[zehd]

Fixed a couple of minor bugs.