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

[Rainer Hantsch]

Hello!

Currently I use mencoder to record from cable TV. Works fine, but when some
movies are following each other, it is not practical to record them one by one
(because TV stations are often not in sync with their TV program.
(ATV+ i.e. is absolutely horrible, once they got a difference of 10 minutes
reaching 18:00 o'clock, delay still increasing...)

So all I can do is recording across all movies plus 10-15 minutes at the end.

Doing so, I usually get .avi files bigger than 2GB when I want to record in
good quality -- but this causes my avidemux to indicate a broken index file
and abort.
So I have to split the huge file into smaller chunks first (using mencoder
-ovc copy -oac copy -ss ........ ) to get chunks of i.e. 1 hour.
In a third step I use avidemux for cutting out all commercials of every
chunk, resulting in many little parts I finally have to concatenate to final
movies.

A lot of work could be saved, when mencoder would be able to automatically
start a new file when the old one exceeds a defined filesize. This cannot be
done by stopping one recording and immediately start a new one, because I
would loose some seconds of content.

All I see as working solution is that a feature is included into mencoder
which allowes to specify a maximum filesize (by default it is infinite).

One solution would be to have mencoder already having two encoders in the
background. One is active, the other one in standby and waiting for data. When
mencoder switches to the idle one, the first one has plenty time for finish
the file and go into standby, while the other one already records to the new
file.

Of course, if mencoder is able to buffer some seconds without any frame loss
from any kind of source, this may also be done with only one backend.



Is something like this already included into mencoder?

mfg

  Ing. Rainer Hantsch