STV Import: SageMC Video Tools v2.0.1a (2/02/07)

[grooves12]

Originally Posted by evilpenguin

If I understand your problem correctly you're having audio sync issues. So if you try VLC and the video plays fine then there's a problem with SageTVPlayer that needs to be addressed, however, if the video still plays back with out of sync audio then chances are its being encoded poorly and the problem is with this plug-in.

This is a problem I am having... all of the DVD's I have burned using this plugin have out of sync audio, an ddo not play properly in any program.

[evilpenguin]

Originally Posted by grooves12

This is a problem I am having... all of the DVD's I have burned using this plugin have out of sync audio, an ddo not play properly in any program.

I forget if you told me already, what's your source, analog or digital? (I'm guessing some kind of digital)

If it's digital, that's a known problem area, if its analog, what recording quality are you using? Also, PAL or NTSC?

[grooves12]

Originally Posted by evilpenguin

I forget if you told me already, what's your source, analog or digital? (I'm guessing some kind of digital)

If it's digital, that's a known problem area, if its analog, what recording quality are you using? Also, PAL or NTSC?

Yeah, its a digital source... any hope of a fix any time soon?

[evilpenguin]

Originally Posted by grooves12

Yeah, its a digital source... any hope of a fix any time soon?

Digital sources are very tricky and the process thats currently in the plug-in works for some files but doesn't work for others. Its very frusterating for me.

In the next version (whenever that is ) I'll be able to very easily add much longer pipelines to process the video files so hopefully i'll be able to find something that works consistantly for all digital sources.

[evilpenguin]

Just thought i'd throw down a update (mostly for toricred )

I got my Dev machine back up and running so I started taking stock of what's still left to be done and it's pretty much just *a lot* of STV work/polishing. The two big ones are going to be finishing the native STV DVD burning I started a while back(no more batch files, cmd windows, losing focus, or imgBurn ) and moving from my full STV mock up to a nice, clean, STVi.

So now without any gigantic distractions, monumental life changes, or cross country transplants my firm goal is to have this finished by the start of the Fall TV season so that means early Sept. Sorry to have been such a tease all summer

Well, back to work

[toricred]

Thank you so much!!!!!!!!!!!

I hope I wasn't too much of a pest. I actually have it working pretty well now, but I am looking forward to any improvements you can provide. My biggest solution was to move to an AMD X2 processor from an Sempron 64 3000+. I didn't realize how much difference it would make. I'd still like to get it working with mpeg2 for the audio, but I can at least live with it this way if I need to.

[mickp]

Originally Posted by evilpenguin

Just thought i'd throw down a update (mostly for toricred )

I got my Dev machine back up and running so I started taking stock of what's still left to be done and it's pretty much just *a lot* of STV work/polishing. The two big ones are going to be finishing the native STV DVD burning I started a while back(no more batch files, cmd windows, losing focus, or imgBurn ) and moving from my full STV mock up to a nice, clean, STVi.

So now without any gigantic distractions, monumental life changes, or cross country transplants my firm goal is to have this finished by the start of the Fall TV season so that means early Sept. Sorry to have been such a tease all summer

Well, back to work

Hey EP,

Excellent news. The screenshots look interesting. Will you be retaining the distributed features of the current version?

I don't suppose there's any chance of a quick hack to resolve this issue? Just need a build that puts <video format="pal" /> rather than <video format="pal" aspect="4:3" widescreen="noletterbox"/> into the dvd author .xml file thinger.

If not then no biggie. Will look forward to the new version.

Mick.

[evilpenguin]

Just FYI, Dirk and I figured out a way around the issues we've been having with the import breaking in SageMC over time, so hopefully it won't be happening again.

Originally Posted by mickp

Hey EP,

Excellent news. The screenshots look interesting. Will you be retaining the distributed features of the current version?

I don't suppose there's any chance of a quick hack to resolve this issue? Just need a build that puts <video format="pal" /> rather than <video format="pal" aspect="4:3" widescreen="noletterbox"/> into the dvd author .xml file thinger.

If not then no biggie. Will look forward to the new version.

Mick.

I'm not quite set up to crank out a bug fix in the old version without a ton of setup, sorry!

[horseflesh]

I just tried this out and it seems to be working fine--except I don't see anything in Other Programs.

I've checked the Other Programs path in SageMC,and it's correct... And Video Tools is creating the batch file/jpeg in c:\sageothers... But it looks like my Other Programs screen is busted.

Any ideas? This is under SageMC 6.3.3c and SageTV 6.2.6 RC. (I guess I should post in the SageMC thread.)

Edit:
I know this is a little arcane and not really the plugin's fault, but the DVD does not play properly in my standalone DVD player. There is no sound. Sound DOES work in a PC player, like WMP or PowerDVD.

I checked the vob files with Gspot, and the audio is reported as AC3, 96 kb/s, 3 channel. I am not sure, but I suspect that the bitrate is too low for my A/V receiver to decode. It's old and maybe it only deals with AC3 streams of 128k and up, or something weird like that. (If I set the DVD player to output PCM instead of Bitstream, sound works--the player is decoding the AC3 just fine.)

That is just a hunch... If I wanted to test it, where in the ISO-baking process can I alter the AC3 bitrate?

Now I have to see what will happen if I take a hi-def transport stream with AC3 audio and stuff it in the encoder...

[mickp]

Originally Posted by evilpenguin

I'm not quite set up to crank out a bug fix in the old version without a ton of setup, sorry!

No worries,

I'll keep a close eye out for the next incarnation.

Mick.

[fyodor]

Along the lines of what was discussed in the scheduling thread, can you suggest parameters for keeping CPU utilization low? Do the settings in Dirmon control the resource usage by the plugin?

[evilpenguin]

Originally Posted by fyodor

Along the lines of what was discussed in the scheduling thread, can you suggest parameters for keeping CPU utilization low? Do the settings in Dirmon control the resource usage by the plugin?

You can't really control the CPU utilization, but you can control how friendly it is with other processes. By setting everything to run at "Below Normal" (which is the default) it will use 100% of the CPU available, however, it will give up CPU time to pretty much every other process.

To actually control the CPU utilization the encoders would have to have an speed limit option to prevent them from running as fast as they are able, which neither ffmpeg or mencoder have.

[fyodor]

Hmmm. I have it set that way now, but I still have a noticeable performance impact when it is encoding.

Originally Posted by evilpenguin

You can't really control the CPU utilization, but you can control how friendly it is with other processes. By setting everything to run at "Below Normal" (which is the default) it will use 100% of the CPU available, however, it will give up CPU time to pretty much every other process.

To actually control the CPU utilization the encoders would have to have an speed limit option to prevent them from running as fast as they are able, which neither ffmpeg or mencoder have.

[evilpenguin]

Originally Posted by horseflesh

I know this is a little arcane and not really the plugin's fault, but the DVD does not play properly in my standalone DVD player. There is no sound. Sound DOES work in a PC player, like WMP or PowerDVD.

When you burn DVD format SDTV recordings to video DVD, it doesn't process the video/audio at all except to add nav packets to it. So the stuff you're burning isn't actually AC3, its whatever your capture card records it as, which I think is just standard MP2 audio. DVD players are supposed to handle it gracefully as per the spec, but some are worse about it than others.

However, when you burn the TS stream w/AC3 it maintains the original audio track so that should work/sound perfect

[evilpenguin]

Originally Posted by fyodor

Hmmm. I have it set that way now, but I still have a noticeable performance impact when it is encoding.

It might not be the CPU utilization that's the problem, but the hard drive I/O that's hurting you. One of the common operations I use is a stream copy which essentially just copies the entire video to a new file and it can really tax the system.

[baddboy_78]

Hello all. I have been lurking here for a while as I tried to work my problems out on my own. First of all, great plugin. The main reason I bought SageTV was the great and active support on these forums. Here's my problem. The DVD I burned has no audio. I play it on the SageTV DVD player and I get the menus and video, but no audio. Any other movie DVD works fine on my player. I have tried compressing and burning SD and HD content. Here is the qdvd logs for the last tries. Please help me out if you can.

Arthur

[evilpenguin]

Have you tried these with any other DVD software? I usually use VLC for testing.

[baddboy_78]

You rock! VLC seems to work fine. Weird that it will work on there but not the native DVD player on Sage. Any ideas as to why it won't work on Sage? At any rate, Thanks again.

[evilpenguin]

Originally Posted by baddboy_78

You rock! VLC seems to work fine. Weird that it will work on there but not the native DVD player on Sage. Any ideas as to why it won't work on Sage? At any rate, Thanks again.

What video/audio decoder are you using?

[Chroner]

I've been using this pluggin since early this year and have recently run into an issue which wasn't present before. I'm trying to figure out what I mucked up but I'm not having much luck.

When I attempt to burn recordings, the pluggin no longer uses the .edl/.txt files generated by comskip to remove commercials.

I recently added another stvi (BobPhoenix's cut point editor) which alters the cut points in the .edl/.txt files associated with a recording, so i suspect that this has something to do with the problem. However, I have looked at the .edl/.txt files and they appear to be ok.

Any ideas on how to go about fixing the issue or gaining more insight into what is happening?

Thanks