I am writing some of my MythTV recordings to DVD and I
get a-v sync drifts during the DVD recording, up to a
second or two near the end of a two-hour recording
(playing within myth is fine, though).  I've noticed
that many people have this problem, but all the
solutions I've tried that people suggested haven't
worked for me.  For reference, I'm using a PVR-350,
Myth 0.18, ivtv-0.2.0-rc3e, on a headless system
running on a Celeron 566 with SuSE Linux 9.2.

Most likely due to changing A/V sync within the MPEG2 stream. It's a known problem without a known (bug-free) solution.

To burn to DVD, I have a script crafted after the
mythtv docs ala the blurb at the end of
http://mythtv.org/docs/mythtv-HOWTO-22.html.  This
involves splitting the audio and video streams with
mpeg2desc, remultiplexing them with mplex, creating a
dvd file structure with dvdauthor, and writing an iso
file system directly to DVD with growisofs.

The demuxing/remuxing is the root of the evil here. All *relative* sync information is lost in this process. It's fine if the sync doesn't change throughout the stream, but ivtv captures will sometimes glitch the sync.

Basically, I've tried:

1) Changing the encoded stream type to "DVD Special 2"
in Myth.  Still have the sync issue.
I think those "encoded stream types" in the ivtv are for the most part like the darkness knob on a toaster. It just makes you *think* you're in control.

> 2) Trying to re-encode using mencoder like the
following:

mencoder <nuv file> -of mpeg -oac copy -ovc copy -o
<new nuv file>

That's not reencoding... just copying the stream and remuxing it on-the-fly.

mencoder seems to do just fine, but when I do this,
mpeg2desc or mplex complain that they don't understand
the file format.
3) Trying to re-encode using ffmpeg, setting the
output format to mpeg2video, making sure that audio
bitrate is the same (384kpbs), and preserving the
stream mappings.  The command looks something like

ffmpeg -i <nuv file> -f mpegts -vcodec mpegvideo -ab
384 -b 4500 -maxrate 6000 -bufsize 200 <new nuv file>

Again, does just fine, but mpeg2desc or mplex complain
that they don't like the resulting file format.

...and a few other things, including using mpgtx to
cut the file into segments or nuvexport (I get myriad
complaints about formats or obscure errors).
Regarding the file format complaints, I've looked for
settings to try that won't make mplex or mpeg2desc
barf, but I can't find any.  The errors look like
this:

  INFO: [mplex] mplex version 1.6.2 (2.2.3 $Date:
2004/01/13 20:45:26 $)
**ERROR: [mplex] File  unrecogniseable!
**ERROR: [mplex] File  unrecogniseable!
**ERROR: [mplex] Unrecogniseable file(s)... exiting.


In any case, it seems the initial problem comes from
errors that are generated by the PVR350's encoder.
So, it seems the right approach would be some tool
that can re-encode the streams while preserving the
stream format (and the sync!) and cleaning up the
stream errors generated by the PVR.  Keeping it
playable on the PVR-350's output would be ideal, then
I can try some user job in myth to do this to all the
recordings automatically.  (In fact, maybe take a
couple Mbps out of the file in the process.)

        Yeah, wouldn't that be great?  So far, I haven't found it.

Is there a simple, idiot-proof way to do this?  Since
I'm running my myth system headless, something easily
scriptable, and non-GUI is what I'm after.  I really
hope somebody who has solved this problem can show me
the way.

Thanks!

There are about 10 different major tools that I know of that can be used to manipulate MPEG2 streams. Some deal with some errors, some deal with others, but I haven't found any that do what's truly necessary.

-Cory

*************************************************************************
* Cory Papenfuss                                                        *
* Electrical Engineering candidate Ph.D. graduate student               *
* Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University                   *
*************************************************************************

_______________________________________________
mythtv-users mailing list
[email protected]
http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users

Reply via email to