Auto encode some shows for smartphone

[mrming]

I've got my PVR setup working great using GBPVR (thanks sub!, the Media MVP and a PVR350 card and now I want to take it to the next level.

I've got a windows smartphone, and I'd love to be able to create duplicates of certain shows in DivX format at a lower bitrate for playback on the phone.

I can do this manually if necessary, but if anyone can think of a clever way to do this after the show has finished recording I'd very grateful.

[mrming]

I looked into this a little more last night and it seems that windows media encoder 9 comes with a script which allows you to create a batch file for encoding groups of videos. Hopefully this will be the answer - I'll keep you posted on how I get on in case anyone finds it useful...

[stefan]

You *do* know about the PostProcessing.bat file? Anything in that file will be run after each show has been recorded.

[mrming]

OK I've started looking into this and now I'm scared.

So far I have ascertained this:

I need to use a batch file (either postProcessing.bat or my own in conjunction with a Scheduled Task) in order to call a command line divx or xvid encoder with the necessary parameters to encode my show and save it to a different folder.

I've been searching around on Google and have become very confused as to which encoder I should use (AutoGK, Virtual Dub, XMPEG etc) and how I should actually make it work.

So if anyone out there is knowledgeable about this kind of thing I'd be very grateful for any help or advice.

thanks,

Mr Ming

[Rich]

Command line DIVX encoder... ha ha.. that's funny...

I've been doing the same exact thing, and have come to the conclusion that command line divx... naw... not gonna happen.

Best bet is to use AutoGK and the script that was written that'll automate everything via a command line.  Example...  you'd type like "Transcode 150 show.mpeg show.divx" and it'd pop up the AutoGK windows, and automatically put in the information you've given it, and start the encode... EDIT: Oh yeah.. do a search for AutoGK... you should find the post on here about the script... I believe KingArgyle had talked about it.

I've written a JAVA program that'll take the filename from the postprocessing.bat file and write all the appropriate scripts and then run them... my ONLY problem I ran into is the autoGK script does NOT wait until it's done to give control back to the script...  it starts autoGK as a background task...  which means...  you can't have an option to copy your .divx file where you want after it's done... you gotta encode it where you want it to end up..

Pretty crappy, but that's how it goes...  When I'm done with it, I might post a message about it.

[sub]

I've been using the Windows Media Encoder that will encode to wmv for the smartphone. It can be controlled by command line.

[mrming]

Thank you both for your help.

Rich - would I be able to use AutoGK and a batch file to run a scheduled task on all files in a certain folder?

sub - I had considered the windows media encode script but there's a bit of a problem in that I'd rather use betaplayer on my smartphone than Windows Media Player.

The reason for this is because WM on the Smartphone bizarrely doesn't have any ff/rwd functionality, which would mean having to sit through adverts - not cool.

I could use comskip on the files first I guess but I've heard that it doesn't work that well with programmes recorded from UK tv due to lack of consistency in the screens between adverts.

What media player are you using to play wmv on your smartphone?

[sub]

I'm not doing anything serious with it, but have tried it out recently to see it work.

I'm just using WMP.

[mrming]

It looks like I might be able to use ffmpeg http://ffmpeg.sourceforge.net/index.php as a command line encoder. One thing I'm not clear on is that you appear to have to pass it a specific filename to encode. How would I go about getting the filename of the show that has just finished - presumably it's not available in PostProcessing.bat?

[reven]

its the first and only argument passed into the postprocessing.bat file eg for comskip you would use
<table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><tr><td>Code Sample </td></tr><tr><td id="CODE">comskip.exe %1[/QUOTE]
note: %n is what dos batch files use to represent arguments (ie the individual tokens you type in at the command line).