Transcode on another machine

[pbb]

Has anyone tried putting together a setup that would allow transcoding on another machine besides your pvr? I am trying to transcode an avi and view it on my MVP with zProcess. With my delay set at 16 seconds, the process works fine when I'm not recording anything, but when I'm recording with all 3 of my tuners the recording stops after a few seconds. I was thinking a work around would be to call a web service on another pc on my network (i.e. transPC) that would call zProcess (or some other transcoding program) on transPC and start the manual transcoding process on that machine.

The thing I'm thinking is that I'd love to start converting all of my recordings to avi's each night to save on storage space, but I've got to get the transcoding process working properly first. Any thoughts? Is there already something else out there that would help distribute this process amongst multiple machines?

[zehd]

Has anyone tried putting together a setup that would allow transcoding on another machine besides your pvr? I am trying to transcode an avi and view it on my MVP with zProcess. With my delay set at 16 seconds, the process works fine when I'm not recording anything, but when I'm recording with all 3 of my tuners the recording stops after a few seconds. I was thinking a work around would be to call a web service on another pc on my network (i.e. transPC) that would call zProcess (or some other transcoding program) on transPC and start the manual transcoding process on that machine.

The thing I'm thinking is that I'd love to start converting all of my recordings to avi's each night to save on storage space, but I've got to get the transcoding process working properly first. Any thoughts? Is there already something else out there that would help distribute this process amongst multiple machines?

Here's something that I was surprised would work
http://forums.nextpvr.com/showthread.php?t=29108

I'm a little concerned that you have to have your pre-play delay so high. I would suspect that your system is really borderline. Have you confirmed that you aren't running competing processes? Have you been tweaking from the default CPU priorities of ZProcess, the transcoder and GB-PVR and related services?

I would suggest that auto conversion to avis for storage, and then transcoding on the fly with ZProcess... IS NOT the way to go. With Hard drives being so cheap now a days, keeping programs in the their original MPEG format or at least down-sizing but staying in a MVP viewable MPG is better, because there won't be any on the fly transcoding...

Don't get me wrong. I love on-the-fly transcoding. But instant access and fast forward ability with a native MPG is much better...

[Deusxmachina]

The thing I'm thinking is that I'd love to start converting all of my recordings to avi's each night to save on storage space,

At the worst, couldn't you just run a second copy of GBPVR on the transcoding machine, turn off non-transcoder functions, and have it look for files in the folder the first machine has recorded to? Sounds overly simple, but I'm not seeing why it wouldn't work. I was thinking about doing something like that but haven't gotten around to it.

[pbb]

I bumped the pre-play delay up from 10 sec. to 16 sec. because previously I couldn't get a recording to play at all when I was transcoding on the fly. It would play a few seconds and then quit (ironically the same behavior I now get when trying to view an avi while recording on all 3 tuners). I assumed my system must need the extra time to get into the transcoding before passing it to the mvp.

Deusxmachina, I'm afraid I don't follow what you're suggesting.

[K.S.]

psexec from sysinternal / microsoft might help you. with that you can start a process on another machine, that way your gbpvr server is still the only machine distributing the workload

[pbb]

Thanks K.S. I'll take a look at that.

[Deusxmachina]

Deusxmachina, I'm afraid I don't follow what you're suggesting.

The transcoding plugin can be set to auto-check the folder where the recorded shows are and transcode everything in there. If a second computer on the network can access the main HTPC's hard drive to get to those files, then maybe just have a second GBPVR running on the second computer.

If another computer can access the drive with the recorded shows on it, as far as I know nothing says the GBPVR that recorded the show has to be the same GBPVR that transcodes the show. There should be no need to setup any other parts of GBPVR on the second computer, just setup the transcoder plugin and point it to whatever hard drive on whatever computer it is that records the shows. The second GBPVR would only be used as a front-end for the transcoder plugin (Mencoder) to tell it where to look for files to transcode.

This would be hard to set up if wanting to transcode on-the-fly, but if it's just to transcode for archiving overnight, I don't see why it wouldn't work, and work easily.