Convert Group

[rickgillyon]

I was just using Convert for the first time in a while. I have a group of 15 episodes of the same kids' show, all recorded by favourite with 5 minutes padding each end. I want to convert them all stripping the padding.

When converting individual files I can specify start and length, so strip the padding, but if I try to convert the group (which will save a load of time) I can't seem to select this option. Any idea why it isn't available? It would certainly be handy...

[Opus4]

I suppose it was simply decided that it was too easy to have the start & duration settings not apply very well to multiple videos, so the option was used only for individual conversaions for safety. You could submit a request to SageTV for that to be reconsidered.

- Andy

[rickgillyon]

OK, will do.

BTW, I'm seeing the attached in the "conversions" screen. This a conversion that started 5 minutes in, works well but shows a bizarre start time (in fact, they all do...).

[Opus4]

Originally Posted by rickgillyon

BTW, I'm seeing the attached in the "conversions" screen. This a conversion that started 5 minutes in, works well but shows a bizarre start time (in fact, they all do...).

I believe that incorrect start time display has now been found & fixed.

- Andy

[rickgillyon]

Originally Posted by Opus4

I believe that incorrect start time display has now been found & fixed.

Great stuff...

[Tiki]

This is sort of related, so I thought I'd add it to this thread...

I've noticed that the "convert all" feature doesn't appear to check to see if some of the episodes have been converted already. I'm wondering if this is by design or just an oversight.

Here's an example:
I set-up a favorite for Start Trek Voyager. It airs 10 1-hour episodes per week on Spike. I delete each epsiode after I watch it, but since I only have time to watch a couple of episodes per week, it quickly consumes a lot of my hard drive. The solution is to run "Convert all" on the series once I've got about 40 or 50 epsisodes recorded and compress everything into smaller AVI files.

Everything works great until a couple of weeks later when I've got another 20 new un-converted episodes in addition to the 40 or so episodes that I previously converted and haven't watched yet. If I choose "convert all" again, it re-converts the AVI's it already converted. I'm not sure how much quality might be lost in the 2nd conversion, but it takes just as much time and CPU power to convert it the second time and the resultant file is the same size. So at the very least, it just wastes a lot of time, and possibly it results in poorer quality recordings for the files that get converted multiple times.

It would be nice if Sage could skip the files that are already in the target format, or at least offer a prompt asking if it should skip them.