STV Import: SageMC Video Tools v3.0

[richardcrowther]

I think it's working now. I thought I was using ver k but didn't realise I had to re-import the stvi.
Many thanks for your help, keep up the good work.

[mikesm]

I finally got the time to install this plugin. VERY NICE. Thanks EP and the others who are working on this.

One feature request though:

The main use of this in my house is for my wife to be able to select from the hundreds of kid shows recorded, and with ease burn them to DVDs to watch in the car. All without me having to manually select the programs, edit the commercials out, and the feed them to nero for transcoding and burning to DVD.

The way the DVD menus are currently set up, it's really not ideal for this application. You select a program, then it tells you the info about the program, and then another select to play the single episode. This requires my wife to fumble around and do the selecting when she driving, which is not desirable. :-)

What would be great is an option that starts playback and automatically plays from first to last in order and even repeats with no selection required. This obviously should not be default behavior, but maybe an option in terms of plugin setup? This is really a win for kids DVD's.

Thanks again for a great addition to the already great SageMC!

[Arioch5]

Originally Posted by evilpenguin

Well this is confusing, because the info you're giving me disagrees with the numbers i'm getting. Out of curiosity, what kind of TV do you have and are you sure Sage's aspect ratio (the one where you set it so the circle looks right) is set corrrectly?

Bah I was away from the computer most of the weekend. The TV is a Mitsubishi, though I'll have to look the model number up. As for aspect ratio, I'm not using anything special. Just ran through the sage setup, I'll really try and get a screen shot and I'll double check that the aspect ratio stuff is correct in Sage.

[scandx]

Hello,
I am sage newbie. I have video tools setup and working. Thank you for the great plugin. I had a few questions.

1. Is there anyway to confiure so recordings automatically get sent to compression queue. Of course I know how to do this for farorites, but for manually recorded movies, do have have to go to "Send To..." and compress manually?

2. Is there any way in sage to tell if something has already been compressed so I dont accidentally compress again. I can tell from the filename (avi vs. mpg) but not within sage interface.

3. Typical compression time. I have E6750@2.66Ghz dual core, 4Gb Ram, Vista 64-bit. Using the unchanged autoencode profile, it is taking approximately 6-7 hours for one hour recording. Does this time sound reasonable? Attached are my logs for current program encoding in case this helps.

Thanks for any answers...

[flashbacck]

Hi,
Thanks for the awesome tool EvilPengiun. I do have a few questions if you don't mind...

Just for clarification, to autocompress a favorite, the follow need to be done:

1) set Auto Compression in SageMC Options>Extras>SageMC Video Tools
2) set Auto Compress Series in Series Settings
3) Add a compression profile to Add Compress Job in Series Settings

Is that all?

How often does SVT scan favorites to look for videos that need compressing?

I noticed in the changelog mention of the option to wait for commercial detection before compression, but I don't see that option anywhere. Is that out for the time being?

Finally, more of a feature request, but in all the text entry lines that only use numbers, could you replace the popup keypad with one that doesn't utilize letters? Otherwise every number takes like 4 presses.

Thanks again for the great tool.

[mp328]

Originally Posted by scandx

Hello,

3. Typical compression time. I have E6750@2.66Ghz dual core, 4Gb Ram, Vista 64-bit. Using the unchanged autoencode profile, it is taking approximately 6-7 hours for one hour recording. Does this time sound reasonable?

i never actually tried auto encode myself, but that sounds wayyyyy too long for ur machine, u should try "handbrake" profile instead.

i created a custom profile, using "handbrake" which cuts out commercial and does a one-pass only conversion. and i'm not exactly sure how much it takes, never really timed it. but it has to be somewhere around 40-50min for a 1hour show. just last nite i was sort of watching it. waiting for prison break to get converted and cut, and it was done before 10pm and the show finished at 9pm
quality is not a big issue for me, so one-pass is more then enough.

btw my machine is an X2 3800+ at stock speed...

[Arioch5]

Originally Posted by mp328

i never actually tried auto encode myself, but that sounds wayyyyy too long for ur machine, u should try "handbrake" profile instead.

i created a custom profile, using "handbrake" which cuts out commercial and does a one-pass only conversion. and i'm not exactly sure how much it takes, never really timed it. but it has to be somewhere around 40-50min for a 1hour show. just last nite i was sort of watching it. waiting for prison break to get converted and cut, and it was done before 10pm and the show finished at 9pm
quality is not a big issue for me, so one-pass is more then enough.

btw my machine is an X2 3800+ at stock speed...

I've got some times listed from my test runs in post 85. As I update to the newest versions I try and keep those times accurate. Bottom line is, you are getting very long encoding times.

[sojourner753]

evilpenguin,
Is there any update on the non-SageMC version of Video Tools 3.0?

thanks

[evilpenguin]

Originally Posted by scandx

1. Is there anyway to confiure so recordings automatically get sent to compression queue. Of course I know how to do this for farorites, but for manually recorded movies, do have have to go to "Send To..." and compress manually?

Nope, unless they are favorites, you'll have to compress them manually.

Originally Posted by scandx

2. Is there any way in sage to tell if something has already been compressed so I dont accidentally compress again. I can tell from the filename (avi vs. mpg) but not within sage interface.

In SageMC, when you are looking at a recording, if you press info a few times, it will toggle the bottom left box to show you file size/format info that will let you know if its compressed or not. And, no, there's no saftey net preventing you from compressing something a second time, so be careful

Originally Posted by scandx

3. Typical compression time. I have E6750@2.66Ghz dual core, 4Gb Ram, Vista 64-bit. Using the unchanged autoencode profile, it is taking approximately 6-7 hours for one hour recording. Does this time sound reasonable? Attached are my logs for current program encoding in case this helps.

I looked at your encode and the 1st pass is pretty resonable (50fps), but the 2nd pass is sloooooow(8 fps). That seems pretty slow for SDTV on a processor of that speed, and I have no idea why. About the only thing I can think of is Handbrake is probably not optimzed for 64bit vista to the point it actually may be slowing you down. Either way, they put out a new version (9.2) yesterday that i'll be putting into the next version that will hopefully help you out.

Originally Posted by mp328

i never actually tried auto encode myself, but that sounds wayyyyy too long for ur machine, u should try "handbrake" profile instead.

The Auto Encode profile is optimized so that it will always use the best encoding meathod which means it will automatically select Handbrake or Mencoder based on the content (in his case it already is using Handbrake ). And if you're not happy with the default quality/speed of "Auto Encode" you can always create a custom version of it through the SageMC options menu to tweak the bitrate and number of passes to you're liking.

I, personally, have 4 different versions: Auto Encode for general use, Auto Encode 1-Pass for speedy testing, Auto Encode 1000 kbs for cooking shows I want to archive, and Auto Encode 2500kbs for HDTV primetime shows where I care about maintaining the best possible quality like "Lost" or "House".

I can't say it enough: I highly recommend the "Auto Encode" profile for all of your encoding needs.

Originally Posted by flashbacck

Just for clarification, to autocompress a favorite, the follow need to be done:

1) set Auto Compression in SageMC Options>Extras>SageMC Video Tools
2) set Auto Compress Series in Series Settings
3) Add a compression profile to Add Compress Job in Series Settings

Is that all?

Yep, that's all there is to it.

Originally Posted by flashbacck

How often does SVT scan favorites to look for videos that need compressing?

It runs immediatly on start up, and then every 5 minutes after that.

Originally Posted by flashbacck

I noticed in the changelog mention of the option to wait for commercial detection before compression, but I don't see that option anywhere. Is that out for the time being?

Unfortunatly, I couldn't add that feature via an import, but Dirk was nice enough to add it into the full SageMC STV. So, it should automagically appear in the next version.

Originally Posted by flashbacck

Finally, more of a feature request, but in all the text entry lines that only use numbers, could you replace the popup keypad with one that doesn't utilize letters? Otherwise every number takes like 4 presses.

SageMC has a very nice qwerty style keypad that i've been meaning to start using for just that reason.

Originally Posted by sojourner753

evilpenguin,
Is there any update on the non-SageMC version of Video Tools 3.0?

thanks

Honestly, I never plan to work on it. Studio development just isn't any fun for me and there is a ton of it that would need to be done to port everything over. So if people want it, someone else is going to need to step up and port it.

[flashbacck]

Originally Posted by evilpenguin

It runs immediatly on start up, and then every 5 minutes after that.

The reason I asked this is because last night I enabled the autoencoding on a few favorites, and only 1 recording ended up getting put in the queue. Do you know why this would be? I do have multiple video recording directories accross several drives, does SVT look in all directories?

[scandx]

Originally Posted by evilpenguin

I looked at your encode and the 1st pass is pretty resonable (50fps), but the 2nd pass is sloooooow(8 fps). That seems pretty slow for SDTV on a processor of that speed, and I have no idea why. About the only thing I can think of is Handbrake is probably not optimzed for 64bit vista to the point it actually may be slowing you down. Either way, they put out a new version (9.2) yesterday that i'll be putting into the next version that will hopefully help you out.

Thank you everone for your answers.

What is a reasonable framerate to expect for the Handbrake 2nd pass?

[evilpenguin]

Originally Posted by scandx

Thank you everone for your answers.

What is a reasonable framerate to expect for the Handbrake 2nd pass?

Here's something you can try to speed it up.

Go into "SageTV\encodingProfiles\Auto Encode.profile", find where it says ...<&>/denoise..., and just delete the "/denoise". I ran a quick test on my machine and it boosted me from 50 fps -> 140 fps on the first pass and 15 -> 50 fps for the 2nd... I should probably think about making that optional

[fyodor]

Hi All

As the result of my recent move-in with my fiance I gave up on using my STV system for TV recording and got a pair of Tivo Series 3s. While I miss STV's recording engine, I came to the conclusion that the fiance would not tolerate having to reboot the television. I've kept STV on the old system (now an office desktop) for streaming my old recordings to the TV through the extender.

Anyway, I was thinking that there are still a lot of shows that I would like to archive and I've had my best luck getting good quality encodes from SageMC video tools. The TTG function can automatically pull designated shows into a designated directory on my computer. What I'm looking for is the following:

1. A way to handle .tivo files or automatically convert them into a format that the encoder can use. As I understand it the .tivo format is basically an mpeg2 file with certain tivo specific metadata/file organization.

2. A way to set the encoder up to automatically encode any files that show up in the directory.

3. Oh-I'm also curious if anyone has a good profile they like. Ideally I'd like something that will compress and HD video down to an h.264 mkv file at 1500-2000kbit/s with the best possible quality.

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

[Arioch5]

Great news EP!

I was taking screen shots last night to show my aspect ratio oddness. After taking shots of each of the various displays I opened them to find that they looked the same in the screen shot

Remembering what you told me about aspect ratios, I was convinced that it must be a display issue with sage. I'm not 100% sure why but changing the aspect ratio from "Source" to just straight "16x9" fixed it! My TV is 16x9 and the test setup in sage shows a perfect circle on 16x9 mode. I guess since you properly set the 4x3 flag in Handbreak it was messing with my display. Now I actually prefer the handbreak aspect ratio!

You didn't think I could leave well enough alone though did ya? I also was trying to convert an Xvid video I had to video DVD. Everything seemed to go well but then it errored out saying the image was smaller than expected. I've got the log file here when you get a chance to look at it. Again remove the ".txt" extension as I'm not allowed to u/l .rar files. Is it possible that this file is so small (700mb) that is just doesn't convert up to full DVD size? When I glanced through the log it didn't look like it had a problem doing the conversion, just didn't like the final size.

Thanks again for all the work on this mod. I guess I'm ready to start stress testing my handbreak encoding again. Then I just need to set up some custom Auto-Encode profiles and I'll be set. Did you ever post examlpes of your custom Auto-Encode profiles? I know there's one profile included but a few more examples don't hurt

[evilpenguin]

The new version of SageMC that was just released, in addition to its official list of improvments, also includes a few Video Tools related items...

* Wait For Watched, Wait For Comskip, and Wait For Archived now exist... for REAL!
* MKV videos will now use comskip files (actually, its generic now so any future crazy formats will also work)

Enjoy!

[evilpenguin]

Originally Posted by fyodor

Anyway, I was thinking that there are still a lot of shows that I would like to archive and I've had my best luck getting good quality encodes from SageMC video tools. The TTG function can automatically pull designated shows into a designated directory on my computer. What I'm looking for is the following:

1. A way to handle .tivo files or automatically convert them into a format that the encoder can use. As I understand it the .tivo format is basically an mpeg2 file with certain tivo specific metadata/file organization.

2. A way to set the encoder up to automatically encode any files that show up in the directory.

1) It sounds like mencoder may support .tivo files already, so you should just give it a shot. Follow the instructions here to setup my plug-in for standalone encoding, give it a try and let me know how it goes.

2) Dirmon2 should be able to handle that.

[evilpenguin]

Remembering what you told me about aspect ratios, I was convinced that it must be a display issue with sage. I'm not 100% sure why but changing the aspect ratio from "Source" to just straight "16x9" fixed it! My TV is 16x9 and the test setup in sage shows a perfect circle on 16x9 mode. I guess since you properly set the 4x3 flag in Handbreak it was messing with my display. Now I actually prefer the handbreak aspect ratio!

Excellent, I was hoping that was all this was

Now I just need to undo the "fix" to Handbrake in the last version, "break" mencoder to do what Handbrake is doing, and we should be good to go

Everything seemed to go well but then it errored out saying the image was smaller than expected. I've got the log file here when you get a chance to look at it. Again remove the ".txt" extension as I'm not allowed to u/l .rar files. Is it possible that this file is so small (700mb) that is just doesn't convert up to full DVD size? When I glanced through the log it didn't look like it had a problem doing the conversion, just didn't like the final size.

Give me a few days to check out those log files, I may have accidentally broken something when I was fixing all of the SD/HD -> DVD issues. Should be an easy fix.

Did you ever post examlpes of your custom Auto-Encode profiles? I know there's one profile included but a few more examples don't hurt

Actually the custom profiles I was talking about were created by going into "SageMC Options -> Extras -> Video Tools Options -> Compression -> Create Custom Profile".

All I did was enable the advanced options, picked "Auto Encode", set the extra options I wanted, and saved it. After that your new custom profile should show up in the list just like all of the others.

[toricred]

Originally Posted by evilpenguin

The new version of SageMC that was just released, in addition to its official list of improvments, also includes a few Video Tools related items...

* Wait For Watched, Wait For Comskip, and Wait For Archived now exist... for REAL!
* MKV videos will now use comskip files (actually, its generic now so any future crazy formats will also work)

Enjoy!

OK, where are the Wait for options?

Edit: Never mind, I found it.

[emverham]

Question: I am using version 3.0k and when i select the auto encode profile (no advanced options) for American Idol (captured via Firewire) it is encoded using mencoder, avi, h.264. I thought the auto encode was suppose to go to mkv. The info for the episode says it is 720p. Isn't that considered HDTV? I've encoded about 4 episodes so far, 3 are avi and one is mkv. Not sure why it used different settings for the same show. The encodes took forever too.. roughly 10 hours per hour.. ihave an AMD 4200+ (dual core).

Another question.. why are four mpeg clips created before the encoding starts? Maybe i missed something in the forum.

[evilpenguin]

Originally Posted by emverham

Question: I am using version 3.0k and when i select the auto encode profile (no advanced options) for American Idol (captured via Firewire) it is encoded using mencoder, avi, h.264. I thought the auto encode was suppose to go to mkv. The info for the episode says it is 720p. Isn't that considered HDTV?

When the Auto Encode profile is compressing HDTV it checks to see what kind of audio it has. If it's AC3 5.1 it maintains it and puts it into a mkv container, however, if its only 2 channel AC3 it converts it into a VBR mp3 and uses an avi container.

Since Idol just switched from its prerecorded episodes to live episodes it very well might have switched the type of audio they are using in the process and that would explain what you're seeing.

The encodes took forever too.. roughly 10 hours per hour.. ihave an AMD 4200+ (dual core).

That time is about what I'd expect for that type of processor. Heck, i've got a Q6600 (4x2.4ghz) and I only get 4 hours to encode 1 hour of HDTV. If you really want to speed things up, you can try using 1-pass or switching to Xvid but you'll take a noticeable hit in quality.

Another question.. why are four mpeg clips created before the encoding starts? Maybe i missed something in the forum.

Those are just some temp clips that I use to detect crop and telecine.