More robust handling of pc restarts during transcoding? (1 Viewer)

[TommySharp]

I'm not sure if iPimp already does this and I just don't have it setup correctly but this is my situation.

To keep my server running super sweet I've got it scheduled to re-boot every morning at 7:30am. That way if the tvservice or anything else craps out then it'll be nicely resolved when the machine re-boots.

I've got my iPimp setup to start transcoding at 11pm at night. I've got to the stage now where the window between 11pm and 730am is too small and so the server re-boots halfway through a transcode and there may well be even more in the transcode "to-do" text file.

Would it be possible to make ipimp only remove a recording from the "transcode-me" file once it's properly been done, that way if the server re-boots half way through then at 11pm the next night ipimp will start transcoding again with the file that didn't finish properly?

Just a though but if anyone has any other ideas on how to better handle this then please do say...... apart from... "don't re-boot your machine"..

Maybe if someone could explain exactly how iPimp queues up files and marks them as complete? I did notice there are two text files.... not 100% sure what they both do and how they relate to each other?

 

[cheezey]

The iPiMPTranscodeToMP4 plugin uses the 'RecordingEnded' TV Server event, if you transcode on a schedule then when a recording finishes the filename of the recording is written to 'transcodeme.txt'. When your scheduled transcoding time is reached the file is copied to 'transcode_working.txt' and 'transcodeme.txt' is deleted (in readiness for new recordings).

The plugin then reads the contents of 'transcode_working.txt' into memory, loops through the list of filenames and starts a transcode process for each in turn (only one transcode is done at a time).

If this process is interrupted (e.g. by your tv server reboot) then the transcode in progress will stop leaving a partially transcoded file and any subsequent transcodings in memory will not be done. The schedule transcode will kick off again at the required time and with the process described above.

I'll have a think on how to make this more robust. You could alos help by experimenting with your custom command line parameters to see if you can meet your transcoding objectives in a shorter time.

The plugin also allows you to select channels for which recording should *not* be transcoded. <-- I use this to not record any of my kids or news program recordings.

 

[TommySharp]

Thanks for that Cheezy, makes a bit more sense now.... Would be great if we could make it so that it handles server restarts nicely...

Just doing a bit more tweaking around with my encoding settings now...