computing.dwighthubbard.info

There is a new script (createvideoposters.py) to generate posters for mythvideo in the download area.

I have uploaded a new version of the cleanvideo script.

It now generates cropped videos that the mythtv frontend and mythtranscode can use.

You can download the new version at: http://download.dwighthubbard.info/cleanvideo.py

I have updated the mythtv cleanvideo.py user script. This version has a number of bug fixes hopefully, this will fix issues where an error causes the program to abort without putting the original video back in place.

Unfortunately, it seems this version doesn’t always work with mythtv. It appears the mythtranscode and the frontend don’t like the aac audio in the cropped video. Hopefully I’ll have a fix for this issue shortly.

Here is a list of the changes:

• Fix to attempt multiple different crop options if the ffmpeg binary for the program is compiled without support for all codecs (such as is the default with most Linux distributions).
• Fix to error out instead of generating a video without any audio.
• Fix to exit cleanly if the python-MySQLdb module is not installed.
• Option to use a work directory separate from the mythtv recordings directory. The script has a list of locations and is smart enough to use the first location on the list that exists and has sufficient space.
• Specified a default quality of 1800kb for the output generated by the crop instead of using the ffmpeg default of 200kb.
• Added an option to delete backup files for which the original no longer exists (should make cleaning up easier)

You can download the new version at: http://download.dwighthubbard.info/cleanvideo.py

I have put up an experimental version of the cleanvideo script. A significant portion of the script has been re-written to hopefully make it easier to make changes going forward. The changes made are:

• Most operations have been moved into their own python class.
• Added an option that allows commercial cropping a second time. This was primarily added to fix cropping on videos in which the main video is 4:3 format with black borders on all sides, but has a small horizontal line at the top or bottom that runs the width of the video. The line keeps the crop from cropping off the side bars. With the new second crop option, the horizontal line is cropped out during the first crop operation and the second crop removes the black bars from the sides.
• This script now cleans up after itself by default, there is an added option to keep the originals around. In the future I plan on querying/using the mythtv “keep old files” option as the default, so this will likely change soon.
• Changed the options passed to mplayer for the crop detection, this speeds up the detection of the crop boundries significantly.

This new version has not been fully tested, it may not work properly. If it breaks, you may keep both pieces.

The new version of the script is available here