Kodi Community Forum

I posted this on the MythTV forums too but didn't really get any response:

I finished up my first MythTV box this past weekend, and so far everything seems to be mostly working. I have a question that extensive googling isn't really answering for me about how recording profiles, commercial detection, and transcoding all fit together. I've read a bunch on the wiki and some forum posts, but they all seem to be instructions from older versions of Myth.

I have the Ceton Infinitv 6 pcie card, so I've created six capture card entries, one video source that is linked up to Schedules Direct, and then linked up the inputs to the video source. Live TV and recordings are both working.

This is what I'm confused about:

• Recordings are huge: 12G for a 1.5 hour program. I assumed I'd be able to set the format the recordings are created in, but the "Ceton Recorder" recording profile has zero options. I configured auto-transcode for my recordings, and it appears to be working, but the files aren't really much different in size.
  
  How are the recording profiles/transcoding profiles picked? Did I just set the quality options wrong somewhere or are these sizes to be expected? I'm not super worried since I have a 3TB drive, but I'm just confused about how this all fits together.
  
  
• Commercial detection is turned on, and when I watch a program on a remote Myth frontend it seems to be skipping at the right spots. However, when I watched the same recording through Kodi, it jumped at the wrong spot. And now that I have transcoding turned on, Kodi isn't skipping anything at all but Myth frontend still is.
  
  I understand that Myth is saving a frame number and Kodi jumps to a time so it might not match up, but it was significantly off. Also after I turned transcoding on and try to seek in Kodi it doesn't even have an end time for an already-recorded program. It seems like there are no keyframes or metadata information about the video.
  

(2015-05-01, 22:21)karlshea Wrote: [ -> ]I posted this on the MythTV forums too but didn't really get any response:

I finished up my first MythTV box this past weekend, and so far everything seems to be mostly working. I have a question that extensive googling isn't really answering for me about how recording profiles, commercial detection, and transcoding all fit together. I've read a bunch on the wiki and some forum posts, but they all seem to be instructions from older versions of Myth.

I have the Ceton Infinitv 6 pcie card, so I've created six capture card entries, one video source that is linked up to Schedules Direct, and then linked up the inputs to the video source. Live TV and recordings are both working.

This is what I'm confused about:

• Recordings are huge: 12G for a 1.5 hour program. I assumed I'd be able to set the format the recordings are created in, but the "Ceton Recorder" recording profile has zero options. I configured auto-transcode for my recordings, and it appears to be working, but the files aren't really much different in size.
  
  How are the recording profiles/transcoding profiles picked? Did I just set the quality options wrong somewhere or are these sizes to be expected? I'm not super worried since I have a 3TB drive, but I'm just confused about how this all fits together.
  
  
• Commercial detection is turned on, and when I watch a program on a remote Myth frontend it seems to be skipping at the right spots. However, when I watched the same recording through Kodi, it jumped at the wrong spot. And now that I have transcoding turned on, Kodi isn't skipping anything at all but Myth frontend still is.
  
  I understand that Myth is saving a frame number and Kodi jumps to a time so it might not match up, but it was significantly off. Also after I turned transcoding on and try to seek in Kodi it doesn't even have an end time for an already-recorded program. It seems like there are no keyframes or metadata information about the video.
  

Recordings are usually that sort of size. It's what your tv provider sends so that is what myth records. I don't know any pvr that does otherwise. Hard drive space is cheap.

I don't do community detection or transcoding so can't help with that.

I've been playing with transcoding options and it seems like when I try and create an mpeg4 from the mpeg2 stream it's actually way larger. I recorded the Daily Show and it said the file was 3G, but after transcoding it was 4.5G. The 3G mpeg is seekable, and the 4G nuv file isn't.

I wish there were some more documentation on how this all works.

There is plenty of documentation on the mythtv wiki and on their mailing list. But IMHO transcoding is a waste of CPU.

I've looked pretty extensively and haven't found answers to either of my questions. It looks like everyone is using wrapper scripts and user jobs to transcode; there are no answers to why the built-in transcoder would make mp4s bigger than the source, or why they won't seek in Kodi.

The commercial detection skipping early in Kodi seems to be an issue with the new API? I guess I'm going to have to wait for 0.28 for that to work.

Right now I have both transcoding and commercial skipping turned off, it looks like with Kodi 14 and Myth 0.27 neither is really going to work.