Recording thumbnails - resolved! :-D (4 Viewers)

[pilehave]

So;

1. Normal procedure
2. Windows routines
3. FFMPEGThat should keep us covered

 

[pilehave]

Is it in any easy way, possible to contact TV-Server and get pre- and postrecording minutes?

Would be nice to use the seek feature of ffmpeg, to create the screenshot within the actual recording.

 

[SilentException]

Sounds about right and safest solution. But I would even go as far as only

1. ffmpeg

or

1. ffmpeg
2. windows routines

MTN is no longer maintained since 2008 and was always a pain in the ass for thumbs creation.

 

[SilentException]

Is it in any easy way, possible to contact TV-Server and get pre- and postrecording minutes?

Would be nice to use the seek feature of ffmpeg, to create the screenshot within the actual recording.

Pre/Post recording minutes could actually differ from recording to recording. I don't think the current TVServer option is good to use. But, if recording XML contains this info then it could be used to improve recording thumbs creation.

 

[pilehave]

Is it in any easy way, possible to contact TV-Server and get pre- and postrecording minutes?

Would be nice to use the seek feature of ffmpeg, to create the screenshot within the actual recording.

Pre/Post recording minutes could actually differ from recording to recording. I don't think the current TVServer option is good to use. But, if recording XML contains this info then it could be used to improve recording thumbs creation.

Unfortunately the XML only contains programme start and end time. You COULD guestimate the approx. middle of the recording but I would rather it be precise in the first place

 

[SilentException]

I think you can use one ffmpeg option to generate thumb relative to video length. That way you could tell it to generate thumb at 50% of the video without estimations. That would IMO be good enough for recording thumbs.

 

[pilehave]

According to FFmpeg Documentation the offset can only be seconds or a HH:MMS.MS timestamp.

Just did a "quick" test on the thumbcreation, clean recording folder (no screendumps) and clean thumbs folder:

415 files of mixed MPEG2/MPEG4 with ~ 5% 720p recordings took 25 minutes to create dumps and the two different sizes of thumbs.
This was on WLAN, and considering that ffmpeg needs to actually play the file (I added a 5 second itsoffset), and save the images both on the server and locally, then its not that bad. I even think it's faster than mtn was.

 

[SilentException]

Sorry for the wrong direction, I must have seen it somewhere but not related to ffmpeg.

About the speed, maybe it could be improved:

It turns out that the offset parameter (-ss) needs to be set before the input parameter (-i). That will cause ffmpeg to seek to that position in the stream *without* decoding it and in fact skipping anything but key frames! This is pretty significant as performance improved from ~20 seconds for 4 thumbnails to about 2-3 seconds.

Edit: ignore, I see you already did that I also calculated, you have 4 seconds for a thumb which is not that bad at all over wifi. Could you compare performance with MTN?

 

[pilehave]

Sure, but that'll be tomorrow

 

[pilehave]

Test with mtn.exe with default settings:

411 files (I deleted a few last night) of mixed MPEG2/MPEG4 with ~ 5% MPEG4 720p recordings took 29 minutes to create dumps and the two different sizes of thumbs.
354 dumps succeeded, so 57 failed. All "DR HD" MPEG4 720p files failed. All files from channel "DR K" (MPEG4 SD) failed. Most MPEG2 SD files and "DR Ramasjang" (MPEG4 SD) files succeeded.

So, mtn fails my HD channel, has mixed success with MPEG4 SD channels and success with most MPEG2 SD channels.

Generally thumb creating is ~ 3-4 seconds, but it spends a lot of time on files that it eventually fails to create screendumps from.

There are some advantages with mtn; it has blank screen detection and blur detection and it can create tiled screendumps. I never liked the tiled ones though