Beirdo’s MythTV Blog

Due to the untimely death of a firewall box, I had to move my colocated server home and extract data from it. This site is now hosted on a UML at Linode. Enjoy.

So, MythTV 0.17 was released at about 00:30EST today.

And at about that time, my backend crashed…. As I was compiling the latest. Just my luck.

With the help of Baylink, the FAQ Wiki now has a new logo. It has been deflowered. We will fiddle with it for a bit, but this will do for now.

Ideally, I have something else in mind for a logo, but this is a good step. Thanks, Baylink.

I have been helping Chris do an overhaul of nuvexport while he’s busy with mythweb. It turns out that the latest version of transcode is not happy with much of the MPEG2 files we feed it from MythTV, and especially not from DVB and ATSC sources. This has caused us to switch to using mplayer for the MPEG type detection and ffmpeg for conversion.

While I have my concerns about the output quality of ffmpeg, it is considerably faster than using transcode when the output is MPEG video. The denoiser we are currently using with ffmpeg is dog slow, however.

Also, the mpeg2cut setup has been modified so that it can get the last GOP frame number for either PVR-250 recordings or DVB/ATSC recordings. For some reason, MythTV records these details differently. Perhaps something I could work on rectifying later in MythTV itself.

I’ve been pretty busy doing work (imagine that!) so haven’t really mucked with anything in a bit.

There are rumours of MythTV 0.17 being released as soon as a couple weeks out, but I guess that will all depend on Isaac’s busy schedule. I wish him luck. The new version will have quite a few changes from 0.16 (as I can tell from using CVS), and hopefully will be nice and stable for most.

I hope to get time and energy to work on finishing the RT-JPEG support in nuv2avi soon. I also have some MUD code to attend to. Sigh. So many projects, so little time.

I finally decided to upgrade the video in my production PVR. So I put in a Radeon 9600 Pro, which will allow me to immediately use S-video (noticable improvement over composite), and maybe later use component with the ATI adapter.

The CPU usage in playback went from 30% with the 9200SE to 10% with the 9600 Pro. Sweet.

Then I upgraded my ATI drivers, and borked Xv. Ooops. Seems 3.14.6 doesn’t like to to Xv at all in clone mode, so I set it to single display using TV-out. All fixed.

I have added the RT-JPEG decoding code, and reorganized the code somewhat to allow for recompression to MPEG4. At this point, I need to actually encode the frames using ffmpeg with their wonderful libs that have scarce documentation.

Once that support is in, I plan to revisit the MPEG4 .NUV support when the files have been cut and transcoded. I’ve gotten several complaints recently, maybe I can work on tracking it down a bit more.

I have created a new skin for the FAQ wiki that nearly matches the main page. Now only this blog is themed differently (and will likely stay that way).

For any registered users of the wiki, log in, go to your preferences, and change your skin to MythFAQ if it hasn’t changed it for you. For all not-yet-registered, I have already changed the default, so you should be covered.

Now if I could get a better logo and de-flower that page…

Enjoy.

I have renamed nvtrans to gputrans as I’m more convinced that it should be possible to use it (when it eventually exists) on ATI GPUs as well as nVidia ones. That being said, my primary development will be done on nVidia GPUs.

I have started a LaTeX document for the first major phase of gputrans – which is the denoising of video in the GPU. This is a topic that actually is causing me to do a lot of research so I understand the denoising algorithms I will need to implement. As such, I decided to write up a research-paper type of documentation. If only I were currently pursuing a Master’s

Since we get lots of repeated questions on #mythtv-users on irc.freenode.net, I have created a FAQ wiki here.

Let’s hope people will start using it. Wikipedia’s wiki software is really nice.