Scheduling a Compression.

[Folkboat]

It's probably been addressed somewhere, however I can't find it.
Is there an option where a pre-recorded TV show could be scheduled for compression at a later time??
I can "send" a recording to "compression" however there isn't an option to schedule it.

SageMC, Sage 6

Regards

[evilpenguin]

Just curious, what's your use case for a feature like this?

[Khristopher]

As a slight variant to this idea, I'd like to be able to schedule my recording compressions to happen between midnight, and 8am during off-peak time (user configurable time constraints).

Ideally I'd like the option to have a couple time "zones". Midnight to 8am, and 11am to 4pm as examples.

[BobPhoenix]

I am working on a scheduler for my VideoEdit plugin. One of the options is compression with the SageTV compression program but I still have much to do so I STILL am unable to specify when it will be done. Most likely someone else will beat me to it. You could also try Slugger's Sage Job Queue with an external app to compress.

[fyodor]

Originally Posted by evilpenguin

Just curious, what's your use case for a feature like this?

Many of us do not have separate machines for playback and recording/transcoding. It uses up a lot of system resources.

[Folkboat]

Indeed, compressing a recording during "prime time" utilizes system resources.

Transcoding a 2hr recorded TV movie to a DVD format can take a looooong
time on a slow system.

Automating the process just makes sense to me. OTOH its not an earth shattering issue!

Thanks

[FidgetyRat]

I agree it would be a nice feature, but I found that sage's transcoder does a pretty good job at resource management.

I recently recorded a 100 show marathon, during this time the following was constantly going on.

1) Recording the show
2) Show Analyzer
3) Compress previous recording to avi.
4) Whatever else I was doing at the time such as watching tv, or the server's other features

All of that on a 3.02 celeron and not a single hiccup.


Then again I don't deal in HD

[evilpenguin]

Oh, I understand what you mean now, that makes a lot of sense. It shouldn't be too hard to add in a little extra logic to the autocompress code to only add jobs between specified hours. Since my head is already in that section of code i'll add that to my todo list and mess around with it this weekend.

Bear in mind, this would only be adding jobs. To actually stop it from processing jobs during those hours would require some support in the core. But in the use case, at midnight you'd add all your jobs for the day and unless you have *a lot* they'd prolly be done before you wake up.

[Khristopher]

Originally Posted by evilpenguin

Oh, I understand what you mean now, that makes a lot of sense. It shouldn't be too hard to add in a little extra logic to the autocompress code to only add jobs between specified hours. Since my head is already in that section of code i'll add that to my todo list and mess around with it this weekend.

Thanks in advance for your effort!!

Originally Posted by evilpenguin

Bear in mind, this would only be adding jobs. To actually stop it from processing jobs during those hours would require some support in the core. But in the use case, at midnight you'd add all your jobs for the day and unless you have *a lot* they'd prolly be done before you wake up.

That's exactly how I (personally) had envisioned it working.

[evilpenguin]

Just curious, would people rather...

a) Just have it add jobs once a day
b) Have it add jobs as normal but for a limited period of time

[nyplayer]

Originally Posted by evilpenguin

Just curious, would people rather...

a) Just have it add jobs once a day
b) Have it add jobs as normal but for a limited period of time

I like to tell it when to start encoding and for how long... That's why I like yor EP compression.. I just setup a block of time in Dirmon. Each client and server is setup for different times of the day.

[Khristopher]

Thinking about this a little more, I think it might work best if jobs are queued throughout the day when compression is not allowed (let's say from 8am to 10pm).

Then at 10pm, the first job is started. Before going on to the next compression job however, it should check to see what time it is and if it is still within the time period that jobs are allowed (even if that job takes until 8:30am to finish). The next job would then not run because it would be past the allowable time.

Hope this makes sense.

[evilpenguin]

Originally Posted by nyplayer

I just setup a block of time in Dirmon. Each client and server is setup for different times of the day.

That's how I do it too

Originally Posted by Khristopher

Thinking about this a little more, I think it might work best if jobs are queued throughout the day when compression is not allowed (let's say from 8am to 10pm).

Then at 10pm, the first job is started. Before going on to the next compression job however, it should check to see what time it is and if it is still within the time period that jobs are allowed (even if that job takes until 8:30am to finish). The next job would then not run because it would be past the allowable time.

Hope this makes sense.

That makes sense, but its also not possible without changes to the SageTV core. Once the jobs are in Sage's internal compression queue the STV has no power over when it runs. (well it maybe possible, but it would be way too much work)

[Slugger]

Originally Posted by BobPhoenix

I am working on a scheduler for my VideoEdit plugin. One of the options is compression with the SageTV compression program but I still have much to do so I STILL am unable to specify when it will be done. Most likely someone else will beat me to it. You could also try Slugger's Sage Job Queue with an external app to compress.

If there was enough interest in it, I could probably modify my job queue plugin to also trigger compression jobs from within sage. Then you could set the constraints under which a recording gets sent off for compression (time of day, age of file, content of file, etc.). This assumes that you can send a recording off for compression via an API call, which I have not read up on, but it seems like it should be something doable via the API. I personally have no need for this functionality so I'll wait to see if it's a popular request before tackling it.

[Folkboat]

Is this cool or what.............

Asked if Sage could schedule the transcoding (compressing) of a recorded TV program - answer no not really.
Hmmm sounds like a good idea, we're gonna develope one just hang on, be a coupla days!!

Only other place I know of that reponds that quickly is Microsoft!! :-)

Thanks

[Slugger]

I've modified my Sage Job Queue plugin to support queuing of internal transcoding jobs. Since I can't transcode my own recordings, I need some people to test the functionality. I've tested everything but the actual API call that sends the media to the transcode queue since I can't transcode any of my recordings (I use an MVP with a not so powerful server so I can't afford to transcode my mpg files).

If you're familiar with my SJQ plugin then the sample rule pasted below should be enough to show you how to trigger a transcode job from SJQ. If you're not familiar with SJQ then you may want to read through this first.

Some notes about this build:

• You must download the beta build from my web server; I didn't want to replace the known stable version in the download section here until some testing is complete
• I've included gkusnick's tools jar in the zip file so you can ignore the install instrucitons saying you need to download it first
• Download the v1.0.0b1 build from here.
• Please send some feedback
• Enjoy

Here is a sample rule that will allow you to trigger Sage transcode jobs via SJQ. This example restricts by time of day along with other values. See the SJQ document above for details on exactly what you can test for in your rules.

# Only submit transcode jobs between midnight and 6am
* TimeOfDay: 00:00:00 - 06:00:00
# Only transcode tv recordings
= IsTV: true
# Don't try to transcode a recording that's in progress
= IsActivelyRecording: false
# Don't transcode recordings that have already been watched
= IsWatched: false
# Only transcode recordings of Colbert
= Title: The Colbert Report
# TRANS is an job id used to prevent the same file from being transcoded more than once; use whatever you want here
# __TRANSCODE is the special exe name used to queue up transcoding jobs in the SageTV core
# "MPEG4..." is the name of a valid transcode format as defined in the SageTV core
# The true/false on the end is a flag used to determine if the core will delete the source file after
#     transcoding or leave it; true means remove the source and false means leave the source
# NOTE: The action line below MUST start with a tab character (not 5
# spaces as pasted in here)
     TRANS __TRANSCODE "MPEG4-High Quality AVI" true

[Slugger]

Never make a "tiny" code change just before zipping up the build.

The beta 1 build mentioned above will not work if using an external exe with spaces in the path name (though the transcode functionality does work as expected).

I've deleted the beta 1 build and replaced it with a beta 2 build. Hopefully external commands and the transcode command will play nicely together with this build.

My web server logs showed that only one person downloaded the beta 1 zip, whomever that was please upgrade to beta 2 asap.

[nyplayer]

Slugger I gave it a shot seems to error out.


SJQ v1.0.0b2
Started: Fri Aug 24 14:48:44 PDT 2007

Reading ruleset from 'C:\Program Files\SageTV\SageTV\rules.sjq'
Action 'MPEG4-High Quality AVI' is not executable on line 18
java.io.IOException: Action 'MPEG4-High Quality AVI' is not executable on line 18
at slugger.sagetv.sjq.RulesParser.<init>(Unknown Source)
at slugger.sagetv.sjq.SageJobQueue.run(Unknown Source)
at java.lang.Thread.run(Unknown Source)
*** Sleeping until Fri Aug 24 15:02:00 PDT 2007 ***

[Slugger]

Originally Posted by nyplayer

Slugger I gave it a shot seems to error out.


SJQ v1.0.0b2
Started: Fri Aug 24 14:48:44 PDT 2007

Reading ruleset from 'C:\Program Files\SageTV\SageTV\rules.sjq'
Action 'MPEG4-High Quality AVI' is not executable on line 18
java.io.IOException: Action 'MPEG4-High Quality AVI' is not executable on line 18
at slugger.sagetv.sjq.RulesParser.<init>(Unknown Source)
at slugger.sagetv.sjq.SageJobQueue.run(Unknown Source)
at java.lang.Thread.run(Unknown Source)
*** Sleeping until Fri Aug 24 15:02:00 PDT 2007 ***

Can I get a copy of your rules.sjq file?

[nyplayer]

I am using a client on my test machine. Just trying to encode 1 file.

# Only submit transcode jobs between midnight and 6am
* TimeOfDay: 06:00:00 - 20:00:00
# Only transcode tv recordings
= IsTV: true
# Don't try to transcode a recording that's in progress
= IsActivelyRecording: false
# Don't transcode recordings that have already been watched
= IsWatched: false
# Only transcode recordings of Planet of the Apes
= Title: Beneath the Planet of the Apes
# TRANS is an job id used to prevent the same file from being transcoded more than once; use whatever you want here
# __TRANSCODE is the special exe name used to queue up transcoding jobs in the SageTV core
# "MPEG4..." is the name of a valid transcode format as defined in the SageTV core
# The true/false on the end is a flag used to determine if the core will delete the source file after
#     transcoding or leave it; true means remove the source and false means leave the source
# NOTE: The action line below MUST start with a tab character (not 5
# spaces as pasted in here)
	TRANS__TRANSCODE "MPEG4-High Quality AVI" true