"My Videos for dummies Guide" needed

[jesse_breaker]

One of the things I want my gbpvr setup to do, is to be able to burn a copy of say survivor that I recorded the night before and give it to a co-worker that missed it.

In the 'old" days, I would record it on vhs and then bring the tape in the next morning. In the new world of PVRing, I would like to be able to burn a copy to a dvd for giving out.

I understand from talking to a few of you on this board that the "My Videos" plug-in allows you to do this.

I took an attempt and installing and configuring this up, but I can't for the life of me figure this out.

I would appreciate it if someone could make a step by step 'walk-thru' on how to make this happen. I'm afriad I am losing a few too many brain cells in my old age

Can anyone help?

PS. If someone is already doing what I want (ie. burning a copy of a TV show to DVD via gbpvr) without using My Videos plug-in I would be interested as well in hearing how this works.

Thanks Guys!

[tieke]

There are already instructions in a couple of MyVideos threads (such as this one), but here you go. (You need to download a few programs at first, but then it is plain sailing).

1. Download and install MyVideos and the mydatabase database file, which you unzip into the GBPVR root directory. Note that the MyVideos page also contains a lot of information about various aspects of this plugin.

2. Also download the following free programs:

• dvddecrypter - www.dvddecrypter (you may already have it).
  
• dvdauthor - dvdauthor.sourceforge.net (download the latest windows binaries).
  
• PVAStrumento - used to demux the file, www.offeryn.de/dv.htm#pvash
  
• and mkisofs - used to create an iso from the directory created by dvdauthor (http://smithii.com/) - note: if you already have DIKO - which I heartily recommend for avi-DVD conversions - you will aready have mkisofs.
  

3. Once downloaded, install dvddecrypter to its default location, create the folder C:\utils\ and unzip/unrar dvdauthor and PVAstrumento to folders at this location, as well as mkisofs if it isn't already on your system.

4. Go into the settings for the MyVideos plugin in the GBPVR configuration utility and:

• On the General tab, make sure that the "Database connection string" has MyDatabase.mdb as the data source and set your virtual root to your videos directory (note - if you have recorded programs in this directory rather than sub-directories, MyVideos may not work: if you are finding that MyVideos is crashing on startup, move any existing recorded files that are in this directory to a subdirectory)
  
• Under the DVD Burning tab, set your DVD reader and writer location, the temporary directory that will be used to create the DVDs (needs to have around 8G available - I just use a temp directory in my main recordings drive); enter a directory location for where you want DVDs ripped by you to be stored and make sure that the DVDDecrypter and DVDAuthor locations are pointing to the correct places on your computer.
  

5. edit the convert.bat file located in the gbpvr directory. It will look something like this:

D:\utils\pva\cmdshell\cPVAS.exe "C:\temp\demux.ajb"
C:\Utils\dvdauthor\mplex -f 8 -o %1 %2 %3
del "C:\temp\demux.ajb"
del %2
del %3

replace the path to PVAStrumento ("D:\utils\pva\cmdshell\cPVAS.exe") and dvdauthor ("C:\Utils\dvdauthor\mplex") with the ones that are correct for you and change the "C:\temp\" references to whatever temporary directory you specified in step 4 above.

6. edit the dvdburn.bat file located in the gbpvr directory. It will look something like this:

"C:\Utils\dvdauthor\mkisofs" -dvd-video -V %2 -o "C:\temp\temp.iso" %1
"C:\Program Files\DVD Decrypter\DVDDecrypter.exe" /MODE ISOWRITE /SRC "C:\temp\temp.iso" /START /CLOSE /VERIFY NO /ERASE /DEST E:\
del "C:\temp\temp.iso"

Once again, make sure that the the "C:\temp\" references are changed to whatever temporary directory you specified in step 4 above, that the stated paths for DVDDecrypter and dvdauthor are correct for your system, and that you replace the "E:\" drive with whatever the DVD burner drive is on your computer.

7. Installation is basically done. To burn a single program to DVD, simply put a blank disc in your DVD writer, select the program in MyVideos, press the "no-name" button on the remote (ctrl-O), choose "Burn" from the pop-up menu, "Demux and Burn" from the next menu, make sure the name is what you would like and then let the burning commence. You will see various progress boxes appear on the screen before the whole job finishes (about fifteen minutes in total). On the MVP the last dialog box may stay on-screen - simply press the blue button to get rid of it.

8. And you're done - if comskip picked up any ad breaks in the video file, these should appear as chapters on the DVD. If you want to burn more than one program to disk, you can choose the "add to disk" option on the DVD Burning menu, and then go to the "My DVD" option in MyVideos to see how much space there is left on the disk etc.

If you intend to burn lots of disks, you could add the demux-ing part of the burning process to the post-processing file (see here ), but that probably isn't worth doing if you are only talking about the odd programme or two.

It is however worth defraging your video files directory frequently to greatly improve the DVD-burning speed. (I schedule it to occur nightly, after my xml updates).


I think that covers everything,

cheers,

tieke

[jesse_breaker]

WooooooW! tieke thank you VERY much for the detailed info! Exactly what I was looking for!

THANK YOU AGAIN!

[stefan]

This should go on the wiki :-)

[reven]

added