The primary reason for my upgrade of Beyond TV to version 4 was the support for re-encoding the programs from MPEG2 to DivX. I thought this would allow me to do things like get my “Daily Show” fix while on the commuter train. Unfortunately it is fundamentally flawed. The DivX has the wrong aspect ratio. BeyondTV’s “Showsqueeze” is also very unpredictable. Shows weren’t being encoded on a regular basis.
My solution is, “TV Tranny”, a couple Perl scripts and other bits of glue I threw together, mostly while on the commuter train. I’ve decided to run this on my Mac Mini so that the transcoding doesn’t consume the processor on my PVR box. After running for 24 hours, it seems to actually be working. I’ve tried to use standard tools so that if I’d like to move it, it will run under Linux or Windows without too much hassle.
How it works:
- The directory holding the MPEG2 TV recordings is SMB mounted from the PVR on to the Mac Mini.
- A file watcher script checks this directory every couple minutes and updates an SQLite database with what files are present and their status. (still recording, done recording, transcoded)
- A transcoder script checks the database every few minutes to see if any shows have finished recording and are ready to transcode.
- When the transcoder script finds a show, it then re-encodes it to XviD using FFmpeg
It doesn’t yet clean up old recordings, and there is no auto-sync with my Laptop. I think simple cron entry that deletes files older than x days will take care of the first issue. And a script that creates a RSS feed with enclosures, or rsync will take care of the latter.
The only similar solution I found was AutoXvid, but will only run on Windows, and uses AutoGK which seems to have spyware in it. So in case anyone else is looking for a solution that allows you two tweak everything, you can use this kludge to get you started on your own solution: Download TV Tranny 0.1
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