[MPlayer-users] Long-time TV recording to DivX/AVI?

[Rainer Hantsch]

On Tue, 22 Mar 2005, Thomas Martinsen wrote:

| Write a shell script.
| for a in 1 2 3 4 5;
| do mencoder ..mencoder opts.. -endpos 01:00:00 -o output_$a.avi
| done
|
| This little script will encode 1 hour, then start on a new file and
| encode one new hour.. (encodes 5 files on 1 hour each)


Hi, Thomas!

As I wrote in my original text, this is exactly what I do *not* want to do,
because I loose at least 2-3 seconds of the movie with every change to a new
file.

Why? Answer is simple. When mencoder stops rerording, it stops reading from
input, but complete with processing all buffer contents. Finally has to write
an updated AVI header. And THEN it returns to the shell script, and no moment
earlier.
Then it has to be loaded (again), has to re-initialize everything, until it
finally is running again.
On my Athlon 2000 (used _only_ for TV recording!), this is at least 3 seconds,
and I don't want to loose one frane at all...

So your suggestion might be simple and is basically working, but it is not
useful if you want to record without any loss of content.


Instead, when mencoder would do the splitting by itself, it can continuously
run the reading/recording part. When it has a second encoder in standby, all
what it has to do is triggering this one to read from the buffers, while the
first one stops reading and hass all time of the world to complete the file.
-> This is a clean solution.

  Ing. Rainer Hantsch