Will the Nokia 770 integrate with MythTV? - maemo.org

Dr. Hood | # 1 | 2006-03-13, 12:22 | Report

Hi All,

I like the Nokia 770 idea, but have yet to purchase one. I am looking for a mobile device that will integrate with MythTV. MythTV has a very good web application called MythWeb. It allows a user to do a lot of functionality remotely, such as:

(a) Browse Program Guide
(b) Schedule recordings
(c) View recording schedules
(d) View a list of recorded TV shows
(e) Download a recorded TV show and watch locally
(f) Stream a recorded TV show
(g) Burn one or more shows to DVD
(h) Listen to music

I think the Nokia 770 comes close to integrating well with MythTV/MythWeb. However, I am unsure about a few items...

(1) Does Nokia 770 play MPEG2 files?

(2) If the 770 does play MPEG2 files, will the video player accept a URL for streaming video?

(3) Can a shared folder (either NFS or SAMBA) be opened on the Nokia 770?

Unfortunately, the Nokia 770 does not have enough memory for downloading TV shows for watching, so streaming would be great if supported, but then again, the limited memory on the device might be problematic.

Any thoughts on how well the Nokia 770 would perform with MythTV/MythWeb?

Dr. Hood

Wooky | # 2 | 2006-03-13, 12:46 | Report

Theoretically yes for all the three questions, but Nokia 770 is somewhat picky about the resolution the MPEG file is encoded. It supports NFS shares but not SMB.

CrossBow | # 3 | 2006-03-13, 18:11 | Report

I use my 770 to watch recordings from my MythTV box.

The 770's browser does integrate well with MythWeb. PDA optimized pages for MythWeb would be nice, but the 770 browser is good enough to use it to schedule recordings, etc.

I have a simple script that uses mencoder to optimize and re-encode recordings for the 770. In fact I am working on a simple GUI for it right now. The script optimizes letterboxed NTSC recordings so that they fill the full width of the 770's screen. Quality is slightly jerky, but very watchable.

I realize it may be a little "quaint" but I transfer the files with a card reader, or with scp.

Dr. Hood | # 4 | 2006-03-14, 01:14 | Report

Thank you Wooky and Crossbow!

Your responses are terrific and informative.

I would like to hear more about how to integrate the 770 with MythWeb.

Transferring files isn't exactly clear (hehe).

What settings are used for transcoding?

Will the GUI script be made available here or at a MythTV or KnoppMyth forum?

Any other information that is provided will be greatly appreciated.

Dr. Hood

CrossBow | # 5 | 2006-03-15, 13:31 | Report

I was not intending to publish my scripts for several reasons:

1. Mine are very specific to my setup, and specific programs I encode.
2. Appearently different cards produce different files. Mine will only work for cards that produce MPEG files.
3. It won't work for hi-def.
4. I have not updated my system (and thus my scripts) for MythTV 0.19 (although you should just need to change the extension of the input file)
5. There are lots of similar scripts. Mine is a combination of what I used to use for my Zaurus and my Nokia 9500, and the ones from the Maemo wiki.
6. This scipt drops frames. I am sure there are ways to produce optimized output.

That said, here is one of my scripts (without GUI). This is the one that crops letter boxed NTSC. It should work as a MythTV post-processing job, but the one time I tried this, it did not. You may need to suppress the output for this to actually work.

Put this in a file (called onepass16_9_nuv.sh), and make it executable.

Code:

#!/bin/bash
 
# 16:9
 
# Intended to be called from mythtv.
# Call it like this:
# onepass16_9_nuv.sh %CHANID% %STARTTIME% %ENDTIME% %TITLE% %SUBTITLE%
 
if [ $# != 5 ]
        then
        echo "Invalid number of parameters"
        exit -1
fi

# source file - Format:   Channel ID_Start Time_Endtime.nuv
FILE="/var/video/$1_$2_$3.nuv"

OUT="/home/mythtv/$4_$5".avi                 # Output file Name
 
RES=352:192                     # resolution
ABR=48                          # audio bitrate
VBR=300                         # video bitrate
NICE=19                         # Nice Value  10=normal  19=Nice
 
nice -n $NICE \
mencoder $FILE \
    -o "$OUT" \
    -oac lavc -lavcopts acodec=mp3:abitrate=$ABR \
    -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vbitrate=$VBR:mbd=1 \
    -vf crop=720:368:0:54,scale=$RES \
    -ffourcc DIVX \
    -ofps 15

1. The crop values are selected specifically for letterboxed stuff recorded from The Sci Fi channel. They may need tweeking for specific programs.
2. Change the specifics for your set-up. For example, my recodings are in /var/video
3. The script dumps the resulting .avi in the mythtv user's home direcory. You may need/want to change this.

Dr. Hood | # 6 | 2006-08-01, 11:52 | Report

CrossBow

It has been a long while since I posted this message and I am just now back to working on this feature. I will try out the script and give some feedback.... A couple of questions though....

(1) Will the original MPEG2 video file be deleted?

(2) I assume that streaming the converted file over the Internet won't be possible. Is this correct?

(3) Have you tried using the MediaConverter JAVA application? If so, which do you prefer, the script or the MediaConverter?

Thanks again,

Dr. Hood