Did I mention that I set up a MythTV machine several months ago?
Anyway, I don't use the MythTV front-end; A recording server in my
rack downstairs (spud) records scheduled programs. Afterwards, I
re-encode recorded episodes as DivX5-compatible MPEG4 files (in an
AVI wrapper) on a faster machine (picard, go ahead, laugh at the
hostname — you know you want to), then burn related shows off to
DVD.
I realize it's a slightly convoluted configuration, but it works well given my hardware constraints, and the fact that my DVD player (a Philips DVP642), is DivX5-aware. That said, I'm posting my scripts on the off-chance that pieces of them are useful to someone who wants to set up a similar system. Here's what's included in the tarball below:
- myth_convert.sh: convert MythTV NUV files to DivX5-compatible MPEG4 files.
- mi: A Ruby script to create filesystem-friendly names for AVI
files encoded with
myth_convert.sh. - mim: quick shell script to create hard links based on an
egrep-style regular expression.
A typical session is as follows:
# (after running myth_convert.sh)
# see what's encoded
mi | less
mkdir dvd && cd dvd
# create hard links to encoded episodes of that 70s show, the
# colbert report, and the daily show,
mim 70s_ colbert daily_show
# remove the original cryptically-named AVI files
mimrm 70s_ colbert daily_show
# create an iso of the AVI files in the current directory,
mkisofs -r -R -J -o 70s-colbert-daily.iso *.avi
# burn a DVD of the episodes in question
sudo dvdrecord -dao -v -speed=8 dev=/dev/hdc 70s-colbert-daily.iso
# remove the AVI and ISO files
rm *.avi *.iso && cd .. && rmdir dvd
If you decide to use these scripts, please look through them and edit the paths (most have my shared NFS paths hard-coded), and double-check to make sure they won't do anything wacky with your systems. With that in mind, here's the tarball: