STV Import: SageMC Video Tools v2.0.1a (2/02/07)

[evilpenguin]

Originally Posted by toricred

I can see that you can use your compression separately, but I want to use it with the auto-compress feature of MC. When I set up a favorite to auto compress, I don't have a place to set up which compression to use.

If you setup the preferences like I described my plug-in will also be used for autocompression

[toricred]

OK, but how do I set which compression to use (i.e., 1 pass divx, 2 pass divx, etc.)?

[toricred]

Could the problem be because I installed this on my client and not on the server?

[mkanet]

Thanks evilgenguin for all your answers. I'm presuming that the time when I'm not doing any burning , dirmon2 stays idle at 0% CPU utilization; then, it jumps up when I need to burn something? If it does use some CPU cycles by constantly polling changes in a directory.. it might be more useful to someone that either burned DVDs more regularly or used the commercial skip feature. Right?

I hope this doesnt sound like a dumb question, but why can't you have your addon start/launch the dirmon2 service when it needs to burn a DVD and stop/exit dirmon2 when it's done? This would be much better for people who would only use this once or twice every few months.

Originally Posted by evilpenguin

1) Vhurst has set up something like this on his own

http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/show...&postcount=189

Its not as clean as you describe, but it is better.

In addition, I'm well aware of how clunky the DVD burning process is and rest assured it drives me crazy too. I'm working cleaning it up for the next version.

2) I wouldn't have people run a process on their HTPC's 24/7 unless I was absolutly content with it. Dirmon2 was written from the ground up to be a very resource friendly low-impact solution for just this type of application. I can pretty much promise you that, once you've set it up correctly, you won't even notice it.

[toricred]

I've been using for over a year and it uses almost no cpu most of the time. The only thing that uses the cpu is the actual processes it launches.

[evilpenguin]

Yeah, looks like there are some issues with the SageMC import where the autoCompress stuff is just plain broken. It'll be fixed in the next version, sorry!

[fyodor]

Do you have any sense of when you expect the next version to be finished?

[evilpenguin]

Short Answer: Whenever everything on this page says "ready for beta"

Longer Answer:

• I finished hammering out everything I want STVi-wise in a fresh copy of SageMC 6.3.2 over the weekend so that just needs to be moved into import form.
• The encoding engine is pretty solid, minus a few minor bug fixes that I should get to this week. I've already created new and improved versions of my xvid and x264 profiles, as well as duplicating all of SageTV's standard profiles (iPod,mpeg-4,PSP,RAZR).

So once all that is complete, I'll throw it on a fresh SageTV, test the basic functionality to make sure everything is working as intended, and then crank out a release.

Its worth mentioning early (and often) that with this release I'm *really* hoping to shift the responsibility of creating/fixing great encoding profiles from just myself to the entire community. Previously, if someone had a problem encoding a video (i.e. SDTV captured over firewire, h.264 inside TS, etc.) I had to dig deep into the script and hard code a bunch of special cases that usually caused more problems than they solved. However, now that 100% of the encoding control is read in from easy to edit text files, anyone can easily debug/modify an encoding profile and then share their improvements with the community.

[fyodor]

Thanks much. My only real problem with Sage is the absence of good integrated archiving/transcoding, so I really appreciate your efforts.

[alon24]

2 questions if I may.

1. I do not use SageMC, (because it lacks the NTE, for the most part), will you be making all these functions available for the default stvi?
I am interested in the manual compression, becuase sage does not like to handle file names which have hebrew unicode in them, and sometimes it does or does not compress them (Commpression failed).
I find that I like the file names to hold the name of the episode, and want a better compression (in the default stv).

2. Will it be possible, to tell the script to compress the files, to a specific directory, and give it the actual series+episode name, from the db, instead of the file name as is + .avi?

Thanks,
Alon24

[evilpenguin]

1) Currently i'm only working on a SageMC version, but I once the dust settles on that, I'll port it over to the default stv. Although, to be fair I'm not 100% sure if my script can handle unicode characters properly either.

2) Yes, that will be possible.

I'm getting very close to being ready for a release, I just need a few more days of testing and fixing iron out the last few bugs. Thanks for everyone's patience!

[alon24]

Thanks so much, I am looking forward to it.

I will be glad to help with the unicode files, even from a programing standpoint, or as a beta tester

you could test the file with a name like "3456בדיקה.mpg" (3456test.mpg).

Thanks

[othy]

This plugin seems to be working well for single-video DVDs, but I have a couple of questions.

When I queue up a show (or list of shows) with the send to menu, the item appears in the Other Programs menu but it has no icon to display it's status. I can still select and click the items without problems, but without the icon I can't tell when it's actually ready to be burned. I can look in sageOthers and see that the jpg does exist (and does correctly indicate the status). Any suggestions?

Also, I was wondering if people can give some indication of how long ffmpeg takes to process a list of shows. I know, of course, that there are tons of variables in that, but I've let the process run for a long time (12 hours at one point) and it was still plugging away on a list with two titles. My HTPC is running an Athlon64 3200+ with 1gb of RAM. Is there any way to see progress (log files, etc.)? Possibly related to that, what is a good practical limit for how video to put on one disc?

Thanks,
Tim

[evilpenguin]

Originally Posted by othy

When I queue up a show (or list of shows) with the send to menu, the item appears in the Other Programs menu but it has no icon to display it's status. I can still select and click the items without problems, but without the icon I can't tell when it's actually ready to be burned. I can look in sageOthers and see that the jpg does exist (and does correctly indicate the status). Any suggestions?

Burning though the other programs menu has been nothing but problems for me, so I made my own screen for the next version. It should be out very soon.

Originally Posted by othy

Also, I was wondering if people can give some indication of how long ffmpeg takes to process a list of shows. I know, of course, that there are tons of variables in that, but I've let the process run for a long time (12 hours at one point) and it was still plugging away on a list with two titles. My HTPC is running an Athlon64 3200+ with 1gb of RAM. Is there any way to see progress (log files, etc.)? Possibly related to that, what is a good practical limit for how video to put on one disc?

Yeah, 12 hours is far long. For shows that need to be compressed/transcoded to fit onto the DVD you should be seeing somewhere along the lines of 1:1.5 video duration vs. compress length. HDTV is about 1:2 and compressed videos (xvid,divx) are 1:1.

Chances are one of your videos has an error of some kind that ffmpeg is just hanging on and will probably never finish. Unfortunately there's not much I can do about that. If you look in the working directory where the video is being created there should be a log file showing what's going on.

[othy]

Thanks for the quick reply. Incidentally, I love this plugin. SageTV has been the killer app for HTPC IMHO, and this is the killer app of plugins. My wife and I are both teachers, and the ability to easily burn DVDs for school is great. When I combine this with Bob's video editing, I can cut everything except small portions we want to show in class and have a perfect DVD for the lesson. So, thanks!

How would the plugin (and ffmpeg) handle a list of videos that is too long for a single DVD? I'm wondering if that could be my problem...

[evilpenguin]

The plug-in has enough brains to recognize when your videos aren't going to fit onto a DVD and will attempt to recompress them to a lower bitrate. I've run tests with upwards of 4 hours of video, however, I still only recommend keeping it to under 3 hours. Your failure could be related to this but i'd have to take a look at logs files to know for sure.

[evilpenguin]

Looks like I'm not quite going to hit my "end of may" deadline. I finally got the hang of writing code in Studio so now I'm busy trying to add a few extra touches to the STVi that I think everyone will be very happy with.

[mikesm]

BTW, is the limitation on one one system doing DVD burning fixed? Doing the processing on the DVD image can be centralized, but I have 3 PC's that all run Sage each with DVD burner on them that I'd like to be able to use.

This will be essential to my wife learning how to use this feature to put the wiggles and dora episodes on DVD for the car trips with the kids. She will want to burn on her PC, and me to burn on my desktop...

Basically, when I tell Sage to burn a DVD, I'd like it to use the "local" DVD burner. All the storage is via a terabyte linux server acting as a NAS, so all the systems can access the volume where the DVD image would be stored.


Thanks,
mike

[evilpenguin]

I'm fairly certain that multiple PC's can burn DVD's. The only thing you'll have to do i make sure that whatever folder the DVD images will be in is accessable via the same path on all machines (UNC or mapped drives).

[mikesm]

Originally Posted by evilpenguin

I'm fairly certain that multiple PC's can burn DVD's. The only thing you'll have to do i make sure that whatever folder the DVD images will be in is accessable via the same path on all machines (UNC or mapped drives).

Having the same path is no problem... It's just the documentation implied that the burning module can only be installed on one machine...

thx
Mike