Well, it was a short week due to brazilian carnival =D but I can report some good progress on MythTV code that I am developing.

This week I was able to code some MythTV features that are very interesting from the frontend point of view: through the frontend you are able to select any video that was previously recorded by MythTV to be transcoded to mpeg2 or mpeg4 (nuv) format. The problem is that you are only able to use this through mythfrontend – that means it’s not implemented in the backend, it’s a frontend’s feature. With this patch you’ll be able to easy put this feature in your frontend just using mythprotocol. You just have to send a message (mythprotocol) like “START_TRANSCODE_DISK” or “STOP_TRANSCODE_DISK”.

The syntax of “START_TRANSCODE_DISK” is very easy. The first arg after the command itself must be the file you want to convert (chanid_starttime.nuv) and then the name of the profile you want to use for transcoding. I’m working on improvements so you’ll be able to request it to transcode to another file as well (rather than overwriting the original one). I should probably release this “upgrade” on the patch next week.

This second patch that will be released is more flexible and works better than the first one as it will be able to queue any kind of Job inside JobQueue and also put some priority in these jobs… 😉
Regarding the work with gmyth I can say that some functions will be added so it will be able to easily use the “remote transcode” feature. Probably will do something to add a recording profile remotely too (this may need another patch for MythTV, this time for http+xml interface).

Today a co-worker gave the good idea of trying to make the “live-transcoded-tv” using this remote transcode feature. But we still need to think how we can stream the video. Doing the transcode inside MythTV we just need vlc or another way to stream the video. We need to think about the delay on MythTV to start jobs that are queued (try to see any way to low this timeout).

Link for the patch on MythTV’s Trac