(Old) MediaShrink - An HTPC focused encoder

[evilpenguin]

Originally Posted by 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.

That's exactly how I use it, except I make my vprj. files manually. Here's what my mediaShrink.defaults.txt looks like...

/saveLog /cutComm /onlyWhenVprj  /onePass /cliBitrate 1800 /highProfile /batch /inPlace /defaultProfile autoEncode /findFileRegEx "avi|mpg|mkv|mp4|mpeg|VIDEO_TS|ts|ogm|divx|mpts|dvr-ms"

Originally Posted by hammondr

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?

It'll rename the .edl files to .edlcut. If you no longer want them you can ahead and delete those, dirmon2 would do that for you.

[tfiskaa]

EP

Will mediashrink process dvds compressed as iso files? I have done this in handbrake but was unsuccessful using mediashrink.

Thanks,

Tom

[hammondr]

Originally Posted by evilpenguin

Here's what my mediaShrink.defaults.txt looks like...

/saveLog /cutComm /onlyWhenVprj  /onePass /cliBitrate 1800 /highProfile /batch /inPlace /defaultProfile autoEncode /findFileRegEx "avi|mpg|mkv|mp4|mpeg|VIDEO_TS|ts|ogm|divx|mpts|dvr-ms"

Thanks; trying it now. Incidentally, what does /batch do?

[hammondr]

Originally Posted by evilpenguin

That's exactly how I use it, except I make my vprj. files manually ... It'll rename the .edl files to .edlcut. If you no longer want them you can ahead and delete those, dirmon2 would do that for you.

In place shrinking is working, but the .edl files are not being renamed. Here is my mediashrink.properties.txt file. Should I need to add a switch to use the "commercial cutting" profile to get the renaming to work?

/defaultProfile autoEncode /saveLog /inplace /autoCrop /avi /findFileRegEx "avi|mpg|mkv|mp4|mpeg|VIDEO_TS|ts|ogm|divx|mpts|dvr-ms" /cutComm /onlyWhenVprj /centralWorkFolder "E:\Program Files\SageTV\SageTV\MediaScraper\workingfolder"

[hammondr]

Originally Posted by hammondr

In place shrinking is working, but the .edl files are not being renamed.

I did a global find and replace on your various VRD path checks (my VideoReDo path is non-standard; it's installed to my E: drive) and changed all references from C: to E:. I started a test shrink, and I saw the VRD icon in the systray for the first time. The first manually-started shrink worked great. I've not got dirmon2 running through all my recorded .mpg files. I'll report back on final success (hopefully!).

[evilpenguin]

Originally Posted by hammondr

Thanks; trying it now. Incidentally, what does /batch do?

/batch adds some extra fixes that are nesssiary for dirmon2 processing to work.

As for the rest of the stuff, i've got a lot of bug fixes for in-place compression that I need to release. I'll crank out another beta tonight.

[bialio]

Hey EP - I've got some 4:3 cartoons recorded in 1080i - they have the vertical black bars. What I'd like to do is convert them down to DVD quality (640x480) - with the black bars cropped out of course.

So I tried mediashrink with

/autocrop /verticalScale "480" /horizontalScale "640"

and it seems to convert to 720p still.

Any ideas what I'm doing wrong?

[hornsounder]

the question were alreday asked but i couldnt find an answer. Does it support multiple audi tracks ? how can i copy/encode all available audio tracks ?

thx for help

Originally Posted by razrsharpe

This looks awesome can't wait to try it out

One question: Does it handle multiple audio tracks for TV shows (.mpgs)? I just want to direct stream copy all the audio tracks. The reason I care is there is a bug in my recording of the local FOX feed (don't know if its on my end or on FOX's). Sometimes (occasionally and rarely but often enough to be REALLY annoying) my HDHR records 2 audio tracks. One of them is empty; the other contains the normal english soundtrack. Inevitably the empty one is the default. So in this case all I want to do is just copy both soundtracks.

Second question: I know .ts files (from the hd-pvr) crashed 3.5. Is that still the case?

Anyway it looks great and I can't wait to start using it.

[bialio]

Originally Posted by bialio

Hey EP - I've got some 4:3 cartoons recorded in 1080i - they have the vertical black bars. What I'd like to do is convert them down to DVD quality (640x480) - with the black bars cropped out of course.

So I tried mediashrink with

and it seems to convert to 720p still.

Any ideas what I'm doing wrong?

Update - with those paramaters the video that comes out is 640x720. So it looks like the vertical setting is ignored, but the horizontal is honored.....

btl.

[farfromuman]

Is inplace not supported for DVDs?
When I use the /inPlace switch with DVD folders it creates a new folder with "folder name_compress" at the end, inside is the file with "filename.autoEncode.title_1.mp4" and the original DVD folder with TS files remains.

[razrsharpe]

Originally Posted by bialio

Update - with those paramaters the video that comes out is 640x720. So it looks like the vertical setting is ignored, but the horizontal is honored.....

btl.

don't know if this would work but try just specifying the vertical dimension. It would think that would scale and crop everything using the vertical dimension as the driver.

Maybe you also need to remove something from the autoencode profile. I don't know what has higher priority (options set in the profile, the defaults, or the command line...)

[bialio]

I think you are right - the default profile looks like it gets applied after the command line.

I think I found a way around the issue - basically disabled the "convert 1080i to 720p" rule. Looks like it's doing the right thing this time.

btl.

[razrsharpe]

Ep,
When you get a second could you take a look at the attached log for me. I am trying to get mediashrink to work with the hd-pvr generated .ts files. On my server it hung up dirmon2 and never cleared it (caught it about 2 hrs later and had to manually stop mediashrink process). I then moved the video file to my test rig to test it (all the settings/profiles/etc should be the same as the server). Anyway mediashrink bailed with a no video/audio exist error. My guess is that handbrake bailed. Any ideas I could try to get mediashrink/handbrake to process my .ts files?

Thanks again

[ChaOConnor]

EP, love this program! Any word on that updated beta you indicated? Just curious, thanks man!

[briands]

First let me apologize, I have not read the entire thread, but did skim it looking for Audio only conversion. I record a lot of concert/ crossroads/ unplugged / storytellers and would like an easy way to convert these for audio only to burn to CD for the car.

Would this be doable using this plugin?

My wife would love you for it.

[rmac321]

EP,

First I want to say thanks for a great program. I've been compressing SageTV recordings for a couple weeks and it works great.

A couple days ago I started using the DVD functionality for some TV show DVDs. It has worked great with the exception of one disk where it pulled the longest file instead of the episodes. I ran it a second time with the same results. What makes this a little more problematic is that the way this DVD was read, the long file is only 3 of the 4 episodes, not all 4. I looked through the log and it appears that Handbrake found the 4 episodes (1, 2, 3 and 14), so the question is whether I can rerun and specify a switch to tell it which titles to work with, or do I need to learn how to use Handbrake and just do this particular DVD manually? I'm using beta 2a which I believe is the most current.

text from log:
- Scanning DVD for titles
+ Found Title 1 (43)
+ Found Title 2 (43)
+ Found Title 3 (43)
+ Found Title 4 (131)
+ Found Title 14 (43)
- Number of titles found = 10
+ 131 (1): Longest = 131 (1)
+ 43 (4)
+ 0 (5)

Thanks again for this great timesaver!

Originally Posted by 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.

Update: I did try using the /DVDtitle switch, but it didn't get passed thru. I'll try the -t handbrakeCLI switch when the processor frees up. I went ahead and tried the Win GUI version of Handbrake and found it far less intimidating using the settings referenced in this thread.

[hemicuda]

Just decided to dive into this. Unzipped the Beta2 file to a folder. Created a shortcut on the desktop to mediashrink.exe to make drag-n-drop easier. Dropped the "Death Race" folder on the shortcut. Things ran along fine for about the first hour. the CLI was chugging along; made at least 2, 2-part passes on the video_ts folder. That's when I had to walk off for a bit. When I came back the cmd window had closed. I looked in the DVD folder and there were no extra files/folders. the working folder and logs were gone. No trace of anything that had transpired over the last few hrs.

Did I miss something?

Edit: OK, it worked this time. Created 2 mkv files (unrated & theatrical cuts I assume). However, no other files were generated. I thought it was supposed to pull CC data too.

[rmac321]

Originally Posted by hemicuda

Just decided to dive into this. Unzipped the Beta2 file to a folder. Created a shortcut on the desktop to mediashrink.exe to make drag-n-drop easier. Dropped the "Death Race" folder on the shortcut. Things ran along fine for about the first hour. the CLI was chugging along; made at least 2, 2-part passes on the video_ts folder. That's when I had to walk off for a bit. When I came back the cmd window had closed. I looked in the DVD folder and there were no extra files/folders. the working folder and logs were gone. No trace of anything that had transpired over the last few hrs.

Did I miss something?

Edit: OK, it worked this time. Created 2 mkv files (unrated & theatrical cuts I assume). However, no other files were generated. I thought it was supposed to pull CC data too.

On the first issue, for DVD's MediaShrink creates a new parallel folder with the addition of _compress on the folder name. If you want to save all the working files, you need to enable that with a command switch.

On the second issue, the cc is part of the mkv file instead of a separate file. If I view the mkv with VLC, the cc's are usually on by default after the shrink process.

[hemicuda]

I checked the file in Sage and VLC and didn't see any indications of CC data.

[evilpenguin]

I pull the embedded CC out of the video (like for TV shows) rather than the actual subtitle track from the DVD's. I've found that most DVD's have embedded CC but there are a small minority that don't. That could be the problem.

I can't really grab the actual subtitle track because that mkv/avi/mp4 don't support DVD format subtitles and the process to change them from picture based subtitles to text based ones is a very manual.