[vdr] Re: vdr2divx suggestions ? (poll)

[ma.hoff@t-online.de (Martin Hoffmann)]

Thanks for those many answers :-)

So here are my thoughts summarizing a little bit:

Yes, i want to use c++, because i'm just in the learning process of c++ and 
this project gives me the chance to relly learn c++ - sounds funny, but as i 
started vdr2divx project i had nearly no knowledge about bash scripting and 
now i know quite well. Since i'm just learning c++ (self study guide) this 
practical thing really helps me ... :-)
The disadvantage of needing to recompile everything for changes and the more 
complex structure for people not knowing c++ ist there of course, but i think 
everyone able to change the "/usr/local/bin/mencoder Bla bal bla" line in a 
shell / perl script is able to change those syntax things in a c source 
aswell - and i guess those are the only things that change (mencoder option 
-a is now named -b ;-) Besides AFAIK there are alot of you out there using 
vdr and vdr2divx who have good c knowledge aswell ...

The positive effect of c++ is that integrating vdr2divx as some kind of VDR 
plugin is easier than it would be with a script !???

Now to the features:
Yes i like the idea of "profiles" for conversion - this is really a feature i 
like to integrate - however the main concept behind vdr2divx was and still is 
the fully automated conversion - no user interaction !
So there will be a default profile - for auto conversion and some other to 
chose for conversion!
I must admit i never thought of the possibility to chose which cutted 
recording to convert and which not - since i convert all !
I guess a solution that would fit my needs would be a "sub" menue in VDR that 
appears in VDR after pressing "2" for the cutting process. This menue should 
ask if this recording should be converted at all and if with which profile or 
which parameters ...
I do not like the "extra" menue, from vdr main menue, where i have to select 
all my cutted recordings each by each to convert - it should be integrated 
into the "2" dialog :-) I don't know if the VDR concept allows this extension 
? Klaus ? Maybe the plugin concept isn't that flexible (yet) !?
Why this ? I often only find the time at the weekend to cut all my recordings 
from the week (up to 10 sometimes) an using an extra menue to mark all of 
them for conversation [;-)] is really annoying - i like the automatism - as 
said above i would like a new menue that would appear after pressing "2" - 
however i don't know if this can be implemented that easy!

So, yes, i see a plugin for VDR, but this is just somekind of wrapper around 
my vdr2divx - maybe someone likes to participate in my project !? Or i will 
do later on my own - i just don't know ! 
The first 2.0 version should be as the current bash version is - running from 
commandline processing files in the JobQ !
However i really like the idea of certain quality profiles to chose from via 
osd !

Okay a progress bar or something would be nice - but it depends on the 
implementation of the whole thing (plugin / standalone) ...
Restarting conversion from a break is nice, but without this feature in 
mencoder, i think it's quite hard to do - i would not like to break between 
pass1 and pass2 - sounds ugly to me :-), sorry !

Yes other formats like VCD/SVCD are possible, however i will first concentrate 
on mpeg4, since this is the format i prefer !
AFAIK it's possible to create VCD content with mencoder aswell, so it should 
be possible to create a profile (see above) for VCD conversion !
Maybe you got me wrong i'm not using ffmpeg itself, but it libavcodec, which 
is a part of mencoder (mpeg4 encoding)!

Leading to the external programs:
I guess using mencoder is quite allright - it always worked very good for me !
PVAstruento with wine is a little ugly, but i'm not sure, if the author is 
willing to build a pure linux version - we had that discussion about a year 
ago - but we should try anyway!
Regarding ds.jar - has anyone tested this ? Does it repair broken streams 
really as good as PVAstruemnto ? AFAIK it cannot create PS - so an external 
muxer is needed !? 
I don't think inventing such a "repair" util is trivial - i have used 
PVAstruemnto from it's very first versions (with windows) and it took quite 
some time since all errors that could appear in a stream could be fixed !
However mencoder does repair streams itself - but sometimes some pictures get 
doubled or dropped where it's not necessary with PVAstrumento - and mencoder 
does "repair" streams depending on the PTS - so i guess there must be some 
more magic to it than this ;-)
But these are no decisions regarding design of vdr2divx - changing this later 
on is not that hard, since they are all just calls of external programs...

Finally one suggestion for resizing the output avi via profile was sent to me 
via PM - the main problem is that i tend to encoding interlaced (preserving 
quality) - which forbids resizing - the other argument is that a fixed size - 
of e.g. 640xY probably means upscaling for certain recordings (480x576) - so 
maybe just a 75% value for scaling down by this factor !??
Don't get me wrong - Implementing scaling to fixed size is easy, but the 
quality won't be that good ....

Now throw stones at me,

Martin ;-)


> At Monday 28 October 2002 20:09 Martin Hoffmann wrote:
> > Okay, as said above the new rewritten version should feature all things
> > from latest 1.6.x version - however if anyone has suggestion for new
> > features or ideas, it would be nice to hear from you !
> > I hope you understand since i'm in my planing state it's rather easy to
> > implement new features.... So if you ever had ideas for new features, but
> > were afraid to ask, it's the right time *NOW* ;-)
>
> After looking through some of the answers, I decided to summarize and
> tell my own opinion.
> I think the latest features are already promising, but what about a
> possibility to encode to vcd/svcd etc. as well, if you use ffmpeg. Maybe
> a configuration file to define all formats could be possible (where
> you could select codec, bitrate, audio codec etc. into a profile).
> Another thing is the use of PVAstrumento. It should be used automatically
> with wine, but that would mean a lot of effort for ppl not using wine
> already. And that for only one program. So would the solution be an own
> implementation of the same functionality? I think the mjpegtools have
> most of that functionality, but they are rather hard to use and some of
> them don't support streaming, so intermediate files would be used (which
> is not what I'd like, 'cause I'd like to keep HDD usage low).
>
> Well the conslusion, I guess, is that it has to be decided WHICH tools
> will/can/should be used for transcoding.
>
> Greetings,
> Sascha Volkenandt



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