DVD burning mod (7/14/06 - v1.4.2)

[owilsky]

Hi,

I think I discovered some bugs, at least I am having problems

Attached you will find the logs for two recordings, kops and chance.

1. kops
I had some problems, I think they have to do with too long filenames. My original mpeg filename was very long due to silly epg data, so I closed sage, renamed the mpeg file and kept the -6549109-0.mpg at the end, this way sage recognizes the file and keeps the epg data in wiz.bin.
But it still does not work, because the generated .qdvd filename is still very long and contains some special chars (German umlauts), which don't seem to work (See the word "Gesetzesh++ter" instead of "Gesetzeshüter" in the log).
Could you fix that and maybe generate shorter file names?

2. chance
Here is generated only the file ".dvdList.0.qdvd", nothing else, so the name of the show is missing. But at least everything else seems to work, it transcoded and generated the .img file fine.

Any ideas about these?

Oliver

[evilpenguin]

Originally Posted by owilsky

Any ideas about these?

Oliver

Yikes, I didn't even consider foreign characters. I'll look into both those issues and see what I can come up with.

[coolpup32]

I have a simple question... is a 1 hr. sdtv show suppose to transcode? Its taking about 30-45 minutes to generate a 1 hour show not counting the burning.
I see this in my qdvd.dvd.log file


Generating mpeg for test DVD: "C:\Program Files\SageTV\SageTV\SageTVTranscoder.exe" -i "d:\recordings\24-Day4600PM700PM-4145071-0.mpg" -target ntsc-dvd -acodec copy -vcodec copy -t 10 "D:\DVD\24 - Day 4 600PM - 700PM.dvdList.1.WorkFolder\24-Day4600PM700PM-4145071-0.test.mpg"
Creating DVD File Structure: "C:\Program Files\SageTV\SageTV\perl2DVD\dvdauthor.exe" -x "D:\DVD\24 - Day 4 600PM - 700PM.dvdList.1.WorkFolder\24-Day4600PM700PM-4145071-0.config.xml" 2> "D:\DVD\24 - Day 4 600PM - 700PM.dvdList.1.WorkFolder\24-Day4600PM700PM-4145071-0.dvdInfo.txt"
Error found in test DVD, forcing transcode

------------ Calculating Bitrates ----------------
Result = 550*10201^0 = 550
Result = 250*10201^0 = 250
Total DVD time = 59.99 minutes
# of Videos = 1
Avg Bitrate = 10201
Bitrate too high for DVD standard, reducing -> 7800
Result = 550*7800^0 = 550
Result = 250*7800^0 = 250

------------ Starting Transcoding ----------------

[evilpenguin]

Originally Posted by coolpup32

I have a simple question... is a 1 hr. sdtv show suppose to transcode? Its taking about 30-45 minutes to generate a 1 hour show not counting the burning.
I see this in my qdvd.dvd.log file


Generating mpeg for test DVD: "C:\Program Files\SageTV\SageTV\SageTVTranscoder.exe" -i "d:\recordings\24-Day4600PM700PM-4145071-0.mpg" -target ntsc-dvd -acodec copy -vcodec copy -t 10 "D:\DVD\24 - Day 4 600PM - 700PM.dvdList.1.WorkFolder\24-Day4600PM700PM-4145071-0.test.mpg"
Creating DVD File Structure: "C:\Program Files\SageTV\SageTV\perl2DVD\dvdauthor.exe" -x "D:\DVD\24 - Day 4 600PM - 700PM.dvdList.1.WorkFolder\24-Day4600PM700PM-4145071-0.config.xml" 2> "D:\DVD\24 - Day 4 600PM - 700PM.dvdList.1.WorkFolder\24-Day4600PM700PM-4145071-0.dvdInfo.txt"
Error found in test DVD, forcing transcode

------------ Calculating Bitrates ----------------
Result = 550*10201^0 = 550
Result = 250*10201^0 = 250
Total DVD time = 59.99 minutes
# of Videos = 1
Avg Bitrate = 10201
Bitrate too high for DVD standard, reducing -> 7800
Result = 550*7800^0 = 550
Result = 250*7800^0 = 250

------------ Starting Transcoding ----------------

Some SDTV shows, while in the proper format have errors in them that require them to be transcoded to repair. One of the ways I detect them is to generate a mini test DVD and check for errors, which it looks like your video had.

So yes, in normal cases, SDTV shows recorded in DVD format should go screaming fast, however, occasionally they have to be transcoded which does take much longer. On my XP 2400+ its about 60 minutes of transcoding for a 60 minute show.

[coolpup32]

ok, that makes sense. I just figured i've done about 5 different shows and they all seem to transcode, i'll try some of the other recordings and see what i get.

You rock!

[evilpenguin]

Originally Posted by coolpup32

ok, that makes sense. I just figured i've done about 5 different shows and they all seem to transcode, i'll try some of the other recordings and see what i get.

You rock!

I have a theory that the errors happens more often on a badly fragmented hard drive, so that might be worth trying.

[coolpup32]

well I just ordered a 2nd 300gb drive yesterday, it should be in soon, I'll have a good chance to defrag it when the new one comes in. I defragged a while back but i've been doing alot of "spring cleaning", looks like its 31% fragmented, so, your theory could be accurate. Thanks for everything

[owilsky]

Now that there are some img file on my hard disks I see that I have some show twice: as mpeg just in case I watch it in the living room on my sage machine and an img file just in case I want to watch it on DVD in the sleeping room.

If it were possible to watch img or dvd iso files in sage I could delete of of them....

I know that I can mount the img file with daemon tools and watch it, but that is not really WAF-like....

[evilpenguin]

Originally Posted by owilsky

Now that there are some img file on my hard disks I see that I have some show twice: as mpeg just in case I watch it in the living room on my sage machine and an img file just in case I want to watch it on DVD in the sleeping room.

If it were possible to watch img or dvd iso files in sage I could delete of of them....

I know that I can mount the img file with daemon tools and watch it, but that is not really WAF-like....

I'm not quite sure I understand what you mean. Are you saying Sage is actually listing two copies of the shows you burn to DVD or are you just referring to the fact that you have two copies of the show on your hard drive after you've created the DVD?

Currently how things are supposed to work is that you pick a Sage Recording to burn to DVD and the script creates a bunch of temporary mpegs with the same names as the Sage Recording, creates a DVD VIDEO_TS folder from the temporary mpegs, puts the VIDEO_TS folder into an .img file, and then deletes all of the temporary mpegs and the VIDEO_TS folder. This just leaves you with your original recording which should still show up in SageTV and the .img file which should delete itself after you burn the show to DVD.

[owilsky]

Originally Posted by evilpenguin

I'm not quite sure I understand what you mean. Are you saying Sage is actually listing two copies of the shows you burn to DVD

no,

Originally Posted by evilpenguin

or are you just referring to the fact that you have two copies of the show on your hard drive after you've created the DVD?

Yes, that's what I meant.

Just wanted to say that it would be wonderful if you could use the img file within sage without actually burning it.

Sorry if I made myself unclear.

[evilpenguin]

Ahh, I understand now.

There might actually be a really easy way for me to do that. I could add an option to copy the temporary VIDEO_TS folder into one of you Video Import directories instead of deleting it. That way it would show up in your imported video's and you could play the DVD thought Sage like that in addition to being able to burn it as usual.

[owilsky]

Originally Posted by evilpenguin

Ahh, I understand now.

There might actually be a really easy way for me to do that. I could add an option to copy the temporary VIDEO_TS folder into one of you Video Import directories instead of deleting it. That way it would show up in your imported video's and you could play the DVD thought Sage like that in addition to being able to burn it as usual.

That would not really help. If I wanted that I could keep my mpeg file.
I want to save space and not have one img file and one mpeg file or one img file and one VIDEOTS folder.

Do you understand? Maybe there is an easy way to mount the img file with daemon tools and play the DVD from that virtual DVD drive.
There were some trys in other threads, but still no comfortable solution...

I see that you have implemented a pre-processing option for cutting commercials.
How about a post-processing option?
Or creating a batch file for each img file that could show in "other programs". That batch file could mount the img file with daemon tools... Do you know daemon tools (http://www.daemon-tools.cc)? I guess there are other similar tools out there...

Oliver

[popechild]

Excellent job! Since I don't have a particular *need* to burn stuff to dvd very often, I had been waiting until this seemed to be fairly stable in order to try it out. The new, clear install instructions were enough to get me to go for it, and it worked first time out of the box!

However, a couple of things worked differently than I expected (both from what I read in the guide as well as just what I assumed would happen) and I want to know if it should be behaving this way...

1) I set it up with DM2, which worked great. However, in the Other Programs menu, I got two separate icons for the burn, one with the Blue dot I was expecting, and another one with a green dot. I didn't expect this to be there since I was using DM2. Not really a problem, just an observation.

2) After the transconding finished (xvid show, all my recordings are hd and I didn't have time to wait for it), the Other Programs menu didn't show the "dvd" icon, it just showed the one with the green dot still. On a guess, I went ahead and clicked that one and it opened up ImgBurn, but the guide made it sound like there should be one with a DVD icon instead.

3) The "window" behavior was not exactly what I would've preferred. It's nice that it automatically launched ImgBurn, but it also minimized Sage, which means you can't really do it completely in the background. Also, I was hoping that at least Sage would re-maximize after ImgBurn finished and closed down, but that didn't happen either. I don't even know if that's possible though. Finally, when I manually re-maximized Sage, it was on a plain black screen instead of a menu, or the Other Programs screen. I hit stop and it took me back to the Other Programs screen, but it was just another step I wasn't expecting or hoping for.

Otherwise, the functionality itself worked like a charm and is a fantastic addition to Sage!!

Thanks!

[evilpenguin]

Originally Posted by popechild

1) I set it up with DM2, which worked great. However, in the Other Programs menu, I got two separate icons for the burn, one with the Blue dot I was expecting, and another one with a green dot. I didn't expect this to be there since I was using DM2. Not really a problem, just an observation.

I forgot to mention that if you are using dirmon you have to go into the advanced.preference file and disable dirmonless operation. I believe it’s the second to last option. I’ll update the install page.

Originally Posted by popechild

2) After the transconding finished (xvid show, all my recordings are hd and I didn't have time to wait for it), the Other Programs menu didn't show the "dvd" icon, it just showed the one with the green dot still. On a guess, I went ahead and clicked that one and it opened up ImgBurn, but the guide made it sound like there should be one with a DVD icon instead.

Hmm… I thought I tested the heck out of those icons, but some bugs must have snuck though. I’ll look into it on my end, but if you could look in your perl2dvd folder and make sure that runable.png is a green dot and finished.png is a dvd disc.

Originally Posted by popechild

3) The "window" behavior was not exactly what I would've preferred. It's nice that it automatically launched ImgBurn, but it also minimized Sage, which means you can't really do it completely in the background. Also, I was hoping that at least Sage would re-maximize after ImgBurn finished and closed down, but that didn't happen either. I don't even know if that's possible though. Finally, when I manually re-maximized Sage, it was on a plain black screen instead of a menu, or the Other Programs screen. I hit stop and it took me back to the Other Programs screen, but it was just another step I wasn't expecting or hoping for.

For image burn launching there are two steps.

Step 1: Launching imgBurn - I look at the file name of the shortcut and if it ends in _m or _x I minimize Sage or exit Sage respectively. However, if you don’t have any of those set, which you would if you don’t use the option in the advanced preference file, it just does what your setting “Screen Saver on Sleep” is set to, either screen saver (true) or minimize (false). However, if you are running Sage in full screen and you do have “Screen Saver on Sleep” set to true, then it’s a bug on my part.

Step 2: Re-launching Sage – For re-launching Sage, there is an option in the advanced.preference file, “Optional path to SageTV or SageTVClient relative to computer doing burning for .bat file =” and if you put the full path to, and including, SageTV.exe or SageTVClient.exe it will re-maximize SageTV after imgBurn is finished running.

Thanks for the bug reports, I really appreciate the input. I’ll start looking into these ASAP.

[popechild]

Originally Posted by evilpenguin

I forgot to mention that if you are using dirmon you have to go into the advanced.preference file and disable dirmonless operation. I believe it’s the second to last option. I’ll update the install page.

That worked.

Hmm… I thought I tested the heck out of those icons, but some bugs must have snuck though. I’ll look into it on my end, but if you could look in your perl2dvd folder and make sure that runable.png is a green dot and finished.png is a dvd disc.

It worked fine for me this time. Maybe it was a problem related to using DirMon while still having the dirmonless operation going. Doesn't look like at bug at this point.

For image burn launching there are two steps.

Step 1: Launching imgBurn - I look at the file name of the shortcut and if it ends in _m or _x I minimize Sage or exit Sage respectively. However, if you don’t have any of those set, which you would if you don’t use the option in the advanced preference file, it just does what your setting “Screen Saver on Sleep” is set to, either screen saver (true) or minimize (false). However, if you are running Sage in full screen and you do have “Screen Saver on Sleep” set to true, then it’s a bug on my part.

Step 2: Re-launching Sage – For re-launching Sage, there is an option in the advanced.preference file, “Optional path to SageTV or SageTVClient relative to computer doing burning for .bat file =” and if you put the full path to, and including, SageTV.exe or SageTVClient.exe it will re-maximize SageTV after imgBurn is finished running.

Okay, I did not have "Screen Saver on Sleep" enabled, so I tried it out that way and it did keep Sage up, but it turned on the screen saver and still popped up ImgBurn in the foreground. At the end of the process it did "restore" Sage, so that worked fine. I guess this is just the way it is - and it does its job very well - though my preference would be to not have ImgBurn take the focus at all.

Maybe one day the entire burn process could be handled in the background just like the preparing is done now, with status messages or icons available to provide status on the burn instead of having to take focus away from Sage and use ImgBurn to check status. That would be nice!

Really great work though - very easy to use!

EDIT: Oh, one other thing I found which may or may not be a bug. When I go into a show and hit "Send to:" and select "Burn to DVD", it starts the job but then leaves the "Send this video to:" popup up, which I can't imagine anyone having a need for anymore, and I have to exit out of it to get back to the show details. Is there a reason this popup stays up after "Burn to DVD" has already been selected?

[evilpenguin]

Yeah, unfortunatly, try as I might, I can't figure out a way around having imgBurn take focus away when you launch it. However, a work around that I use is to have my remote control setup so that when imgBurn is in focus, every button will call "SageTV.exe -awake" which will give focus back to SageTV.

As for the "Send To..." pop-up, I bet I can fix that for the next version.

[jlindborg]

If I set everything up on the server, will this work through an MVP interface by any chance? I tested it on my single server setup and home and it works dandy but I'm heading over to the folk's place and I'd like to let them select to burn things to DVD from their MVP interface in the living room if possible - I don't see anything specific in the instructions about this working or not...

thanks

-J

[BBCritical]

I tried to install this on my client pc and ran into some problems:
1) The easyDVDSingleComputerSetup.exe dies at line 6 because it is looking for the "sage.properties" file when on the client it is the "sageclient.properties" file. I changed the name in the .pl file but it keeps happening.

2) I then made the changes directly in the cofig files and tried to burn a multi file dvd. The dvdlists seem to be created in the work folders and some batch exe processes are created as well but when I select process dvd, nothing happens. There is nothing shown in other programs, no processes runnng + I dont what else to look for.


Any ideas?

[coolpup32]

I'm getting the 2 icons also, when the blue goes away and I only have the green i can select the green icon and it starts burning. I didnt disable "dirmon-less" so i'm thinking thats the problem.

[evilpenguin]

Originally Posted by jlindborg

If I set everything up on the server, will this work through an MVP interface by any chance? I tested it on my single server setup and home and it works dandy but I'm heading over to the folk's place and I'd like to let them select to burn things to DVD from their MVP interface in the living room if possible - I don't see anything specific in the instructions about this working or not...

thanks

-J

I'm not really sure what happens when the MVP trys to execute an extrenal process. In my mind I just think it would fail, but its possible that it would execute the code on the server in which case it might work. Give it a shot and let me know what happens

Originally Posted by BBCritical

I tried to install this on my client pc and ran into some problems:
1) The easyDVDSingleComputerSetup.exe dies at line 6 because it is looking for the "sage.properties" file when on the client it is the "sageclient.properties" file. I changed the name in the .pl file but it keeps happening.

2) I then made the changes directly in the cofig files and tried to burn a multi file dvd. The dvdlists seem to be created in the work folders and some batch exe processes are created as well but when I select process dvd, nothing happens. There is nothing shown in other programs, no processes runnng + I dont what else to look for.


Any ideas?

1) How exactly do you want the DVD's to be created. Are you going to be doing all of the sceduling/transcoding/burning on the Client, or is some of the work going to be done on the server.

2)When you select "process DVD" does the dvdList turn into a qdvd file? If it does, then check your "Other Programs" folder (in windows, not in Sage) and check to see that an autoburn.bat file is created. If the .bat, .jpg, and shortcut file are there, but nothing is showing in the "Other Programs" menu in Sage, then that means that you don't have it set up properly in your sageclient.properties file. Make sure you have this line...

mlbdude/other_programs=C\:\\sageOthers

If you are using dirmon, then right after you hit "process DVD" it should start automatically, however, if you aren't using dirmon, then you'll need to go to the "Other Programs" menu and press the item with the green button to start.

Originally Posted by coolpup32

I'm getting the 2 icons also, when the blue goes away and I only have the green i can select the green icon and it starts burning. I didnt disable "dirmon-less" so i'm thinking thats the problem.

Yeah, I really need should disable that by default, cause Dirmon is still how I recommend to run it.