(Old) MediaShrink - An HTPC focused encoder

[razrsharpe]

Originally Posted by toricred

I've just started using the HD-PVR and I tried this on one of those recordings. It worked, but it took 2-3 hours for a 1 hour recording. Should this work any better than that in your opinion?

I just tried this and it crashed the first .ts file I sent through it. However mediashrink didn't throw an exception and just kept plugging along for about 24 hrs before I noticed it. I had to manually kill the process via taskmanager. What settings did you use (vanilla autoencode profile? or something different? Is your HD-PVR set up for SPDIF or Analog Audio?)? I first tested it out on a test clip and it worked fine but not when I did the full episode.

[toricred]

I had to modify the autoencode profile and remove the reference to quickstream fix and a couple of other things I don't remember off the top of my head.

[jbuszkie]

Maybe I missed it.. but is there a way to save the transcoded file to a different place? I don't want to put it in my TV folder until I get a chance to check it out and replace a bunch at once. I'm using the /centralWorkFolder which is nice since I'm on a network drive. But I'd like to save the file locally.

Jim

[razrsharpe]

Originally Posted by jbuszkie

Maybe I missed it.. but is there a way to save the transcoded file to a different place?

not sure if it has made it into the new mediashrink code or not but in the old version (video tools 3.0/3.5) you could specify the following option in either your .profile or in your call to media shrink.

/outputMode "Path<:>C:\Path\To\Dir"

[jbuszkie]

After a little digging and experimentation.. It seems like:

/outputDirectory c:\Path\To\dir

Works...

Oh.. and great job on this.. I've always wanted a *painless* way to extract the movie from all my kid's DVDs!

[ChaOConnor]

EP, first off thank you for an awesome program! I was doing all this by hand w/ HandBrake and you are making my life too easy. Thank you!

Had an unusual issue last night. I was converting all of Thundercats vol 2 DVDs (all were ripped to my HD), and for disks 1-3, each episode was detected and ripped correctly. For disk 4, it only pulled in the first track (which is a combination of all the episodes) vs the individual episodes. Each DVD has the same structure, but for disk 4 it looks like it encoded it like a movie.

My question is this, is there a way to force MediaShrink to pull certain tracks? For instance if I know on the Thundercats DVD set, tracks 2-5 are always the episodes, is there a way to hard encode that?

Thanks again, AMAZING product!!!

[jbuszkie]

I'm trying to decode a DVD and the audio doesn't show up.

Attached is the log. I quickly tried to see if I could determine anything, but I couldn't.

Other DVDs that I drag and drop seem to work fine. I'm using the defaults for audio in the setup file.

Am I missing something?

[nyplayer]

EP,

Videoredo has a bad habit of choosing the wrong audio when doing a quickfix or cutting commercials. I have attched a log.

The mpg has 2 audio tracks the regular and the SAP.. videoredo keeps selecting the SAP. It has really gotten bad since I have gone mostly to clear qam. If I eliminate videoredo then handbrake selects the proper audio. So cutting commercials even with videoredo is not reliable.

[ChaOConnor]

Question about the auto profile... when I drag a folder w/ a ripped TV show series onto MediaShrink, what profile does it use? The SDTV one from the first post? It's an old 80's TV show (ThunderCats to be precise...). Thanks!

[troycheek]

Originally Posted by zzmystique

The files do not transcode using the hand brake GUI. The error message reads as follows.

No Title found. Please make sure you have selected a valid, non-copy protected source......

I have the same problem with files recorded from my Plextor ConvertX TV-402U. The best solution I've found so far is to run them through ffmpeg like so:

ffmpeg -i input.mpg -vcodec copy -acodec copy output.mpg

In my case, the resulting output file can be processed by MediaShrink quite nicely. I use the ffmpeg.exe included in the MediaShrink package. If it doesn't work for you, you might try the SageTVtranscoder with the same command line.

[bialio]

Hey EP - for some reason I've run into a disc that MediaShrink doesn't like - any clue from this output?

    - Found File: (V:\Videos\TV Shows\Stargate SG1\Season 10\SG1105\VIDEO_TS)
  + Getting DVD info: "C:\Users\bialio\Desktop\Shrink2\mediaEngineBins\Handbrake 9.3\HandBrakeCLI.exe" -i "V:/Videos/TV Shows/Stargate SG1/Season 10/SG1105/VIDEO_TS" -t 0 2>&1
    - Scanning DVD for titles
      + Found Title 1 (43)
      + Found Title 2 (43)
      + Found Title 3 (43)
      + Found Title 4 (43)
      + Found Title 7 (15)
      + Found Title 8 (23)
      + Found Title 9 (23)
    - Number of titles found = 10
      + 43 (4): Longest = 43 (4)
      + 23 (2): Longest = sum of durs: (43 ~= 23 * 2(46)
      + 15 (1)
      + 0 (3)
    +  Checking Title: 11
    +  Checking Title: 3
    +  Checking Title: 7
    +  Checking Title: 9
    +  Checking Title: 2
    +  Checking Title: 8
    +  Checking Title: 1
    +  Checking Title: 4
    +  Checking Title: 10
    +  Checking Title: 5
  ! No input file found
    - Making Log File: C:\Users\bialio\Desktop\Shrink2\mediaEngine.log

[ChaOConnor]

Originally Posted by bialio

Hey EP - for some reason I've run into a disc that MediaShrink doesn't like - any clue from this output?

    - Found File: (V:\Videos\TV Shows\Stargate SG1\Season 10\SG1105\VIDEO_TS)
  + Getting DVD info: "C:\Users\bialio\Desktop\Shrink2\mediaEngineBins\Handbrake 9.3\HandBrakeCLI.exe" -i "V:/Videos/TV Shows/Stargate SG1/Season 10/SG1105/VIDEO_TS" -t 0 2>&1
    - Scanning DVD for titles
      + Found Title 1 (43)
      + Found Title 2 (43)
      + Found Title 3 (43)
      + Found Title 4 (43)
      + Found Title 7 (15)
      + Found Title 8 (23)
      + Found Title 9 (23)
    - Number of titles found = 10
      + 43 (4): Longest = 43 (4)
      + 23 (2): Longest = sum of durs: (43 ~= 23 * 2(46)
      + 15 (1)
      + 0 (3)
    +  Checking Title: 11
    +  Checking Title: 3
    +  Checking Title: 7
    +  Checking Title: 9
    +  Checking Title: 2
    +  Checking Title: 8
    +  Checking Title: 1
    +  Checking Title: 4
    +  Checking Title: 10
    +  Checking Title: 5
  ! No input file found
    - Making Log File: C:\Users\bialio\Desktop\Shrink2\mediaEngine.log

I think it's just MediaShrink being aware enough to not compress a disk it feels is inferior. SG-1 jumped the shark so long ago it's not even funny. But that's okay, I still watch it too. Can't... stop... watching...

[evilpenguin]

Sometimes TV show DVD's have one long title that's all the episodes and then a few smaller titles that's all the episodes individually. So to detect that I add up the sum of the smaller episodes and compare it to the length of the longest title. Most of the time it works flawlessly, but sometimes it has trouble with disks with special features like this one. This one looks pretty obvious so I can prolly get it fixed.

[bialio]

So in the mean time if I rip each episode individually (ie "Main Movie" option typical to most DVD ripping SW) then point it at mediaShrink I can avoid this issue (for this particular disc)?

[evilpenguin]

Originally Posted by nyplayer

EP,

Videoredo has a bad habit of choosing the wrong audio when doing a quickfix or cutting commercials. I have attched a log.

The mpg has 2 audio tracks the regular and the SAP.. videoredo keeps selecting the SAP. It has really gotten bad since I have gone mostly to clear qam. If I eliminate videoredo then handbrake selects the proper audio. So cutting commercials even with videoredo is not reliable.

Hey, there's nothing I can do about that, but I posted something on the VRD forums to see if they can fix it.

[phelme]

Originally Posted by razrsharpe

I just tried this and it crashed the first .ts file I sent through it. However mediashrink didn't throw an exception and just kept plugging along for about 24 hrs before I noticed it. I had to manually kill the process via taskmanager. What settings did you use (vanilla autoencode profile? or something different? Is your HD-PVR set up for SPDIF or Analog Audio?)? I first tested it out on a test clip and it worked fine but not when I did the full episode.

Is anyone getting good conversions of HD-PVR transport streams recorded through Sage? I'm always getting the "no audio or video" error:

+ Getting Video Info: (F:\SageTV\BigMedia1-Recordings\Damages-LookWhatHeDugUpThisTime-5301131-0.workFolder\Damages-LookWhatHeDugUpThisTime-5...

...

- Remaining Commands (6): (/setOptions)
+ Command : /setOptions
+ Parsing switches
- optionsString: /ERROR "No Audio or Video"
! Error reported from profile file: No Audio or Video
! Moving onto next file...

[hammondr]

Two questions. One on logging, and another on compression into an avi container.

#1. This must be a stupid question, but I couldn't find the answer anywhere here. Please excuse a newbie question. I'm using beta2, but it doesn't seem to be generating any logs at all. The first post in this thread hinted a log file should be found alongside the mediaShrink.exe file. No joy.

#2. I noticed this when I started trying to compress recorded SDTV files from the default MPG. Compression using the default mkv container seemed to work. However, something started failing once I added "/avi" to mediaScraper.defaults.txt. Since I ran mediaShrink from the command line, I can see the last lines of on-screen logging:

- Remaining Commands (6): (/setOptions)
+ Command : /setOptions
+ Parsing switches
- optionsString: /finalOutputName "f:\pvr02\TheSongofBernadette-2097052-0.autoEncode.avi"
- Adding to to options Hash
+ Key: finalOutputName
+ Value: f:\pvr02\TheSongofBernadette-2097052-0.autoEncode.avi

- Remaining Commands (5): (/exe mkdir)
+ Command : /exe mkdir
+ Command Empty, Skipping: ""

- Remaining Commands (4): (/exe copy)
+ Command : /exe copy
- Executing command: copy "f:\pvr02\TheSongofBernadette-2097052-0.workFolder\TheSongofBernadette-2097052-0.scratch.41.MAIN.avi" "f:\pvr02\TheS...

- Remaining Commands (3): (/exe move)
+ Command : /exe move
+ Command Empty, Skipping: ""

- Remaining Commands (2): (/exe move)
+ Command : /exe move
+ Command Empty, Skipping: ""

- Remaining Commands (1): (/exe move)
+ Command : /exe move
+ Command Empty, Skipping: ""

- Remaining Commands (0): (/setOptions)
+ Command : /setOptions
+ Parsing switches
- optionsString: /outputFailure
- Adding to to options Hash
+ Key: outputFailure

+ Deleting temp files (f:\pvr02\TheSongofBernadette-2097052-0.workFolder)
- Deleting File: f:\pvr02\TheSongofBernadette-2097052-0.workFolder
+ Deleting Folder: rmdir /S /Q "f:\pvr02\TheSongofBernadette-2097052-0.workFolder"

+ Deleting temp files (f:\pvr02\TheSongofBernadette-2097052-0.autoEncode.(1).log)
- Deleting File: f:\pvr02\TheSongofBernadette-2097052-0.autoEncode.(1).log
+ Deleting File: del /Q "f:\pvr02\TheSongofBernadette-2097052-0.autoEncode.(1).log"

I saw the working folder in use, and that folder isn't there anymore of course. But the final .avi is nowhere to be found.

Any thoughts?

[razrsharpe]

Originally Posted by hammondr

#1. This must be a stupid question, but I couldn't find the answer anywhere here. Please excuse a newbie question. I'm using beta2, but it doesn't seem to be generating any logs at all. The first post in this thread hinted a log file should be found alongside the mediaShrink.exe file. No joy.

To your command line add /saveLog switch... (its buried somewhere in this thread). You can also add /centralWorkFolder "%WORKFOLDER%" to do all your processing in a central folder...

So your command line should be:
mediaShrink.exe %VIDEOFILE% /saveLog %OTHER SWITCHES

Prepend start /belownormal /b /w to start mediashrink at below normal priority so the computer is still responsive.

[hammondr]

Thx, razrsharpe. I'm trying that now.

[hammondr]

I think I know the answer, but maybe someone here has already done the work. Note: I use ShowAnalyzer to create both .edl and .vprj for all my Sage recordings. Sage uses .edl files for commercial skipping, and I use the .vprj files for "manual" commercial cutting on occasion.

If I want to use EP's experimental /cutComm AND /inplace switches, do I need to handle the deletion of .edl (commercial cut) files on my own? In other words, do I need to check for successful medaiShrink.exe completion and remove or rename my existing .edl files? If not, I assume Sage would try to play the new .avi file -- which is shorter and ostensibly has no commercials -- but would still try to skip commercials in the lingering .edl file.

If I got this right, does anyone have a handy batch file for doing this already?