MPEG-2 on Wimpy's World

IMDB Film Summary as a MPEG-2 video, Part 2

martin@wimpress.com (Martin Wimpress) — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 08:48:36 +0000

UPDATE! I no longer use or maintain the script below. I suggest the vastly superior Sheet Maker for Linux.

Back in April I released a script to create a MPEG video summarising a movie using data from IMDB, you can find the original post in the URL below to learn why I created such a script in the first place.

IMDB Film Summary as a MPEG-2 video

Today I’ve released v2.0 of that script, which is almost a complete re-write mostly thanks to Eric at yPass.net who contributed significantly. Thanks to Eric the script is much improved since version 1.0, here is a run down of what’s new.

v2.0 2009, 19th September.

Merged yet more contributions from Eric, http://www.ypass.net. Thanks Eric!
Added usage instructions.
Added categorisation by Certificate.
Added dynamic computation of video bitrate.
Added silent audio generation.
Added a shell script to reprocess an entire film store.
Re-added MPEG-2 video encoding.
Improved video encoding speed by removing pre-processing with jpeg2yuv.
Fixed spiffy animations when cover art is not available.
Fixed spiffy animations on platforms that may have incomplete GD.
Modified filename input so that an input filename is optional rather than mandatory.

v1.2 2009, 17th July.

Merged extensive contributions from Eric, http://www.ypass.net. Thanks Eric!
Updated the README to reflect Eric’s changes.
MPEG-4 video encoding replaced MPEG-2 video encoding.
Never released to the public.

To download the script and find out how to make full use of it visit the release page below.

IMDB-to-MPEG

As it stands the IMDB-to-MPEG script does what I require, so I will maintain it in it’s current form. However, Eric has been working on a new direction by adding support for NetFlix, creating a GUI with php-gtk and some other cool stuff. While Eric has shared the details with me, I simply don’t have the time to add all that good stuff to IMDB-to-MPEG, so if you like the sound of what Eric has been up to hop over to his site to find out more.

Netflix Has a Developer API

M2VRequantiser for 32-bit and 64-bit Linux

martin@wimpress.com (Martin Wimpress) — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 16:47:20 +0000

I recently discovered that tcrequant (part of the transcode suite of tools) has been deprecated. Worst still I found that when I ran tcrequant on my 64-bit Linux workstation is was corrupting the video. See the links below for details.

Therefore I decided to get the M2VRequantiser code from Metakine working on both 32-bit and 64-bit Linux as a replacement for tcrequant. M2VRequantiser accepts the raw MPEG2 video data (not VOB) from the standard input and writes the recompressed frames to the standard output. M2VRequantiser takes two arguments. The first one is a floating point value specifying the ratio of compression. The second is the size of the M2V, since the data is streamed to M2VRequantiser it cannot know the M2V size. The following command would recompress ‘original.m2v’, whose size is 1024000 bytes, by a factor of 1.25.

M2VRequantiser 1.25 1024000 < original.m2v > requantised.m2v

I’ve only tested on 32-bit and 64-bit Linux, specifically Ubuntu 8.10. It works for me but I’d be interested to get your feedback.

M2VRequantiser

Converting DVB-T to DVD Compliant MPEG-2

martin@wimpress.com (Martin Wimpress) — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 23:46:26 +0000

I am just about to clean up and convert another batch of programmes I have recorded from Freeview (DVB-T in the UK) so that I can add them to my DLNA Server. I thought I’d share the method I use on Ubuntu.

By clean up, I mean edit out any adverts and trim crap from the start and the end of the recordings. It just so happens that the result of this process is a DVD compliant MPEG-2 which is suitable for DVD authoring, or in my case, streaming around the house. This method of conversion should work for any DVB PVR which allows you to export recordings via USB and, of course, MythTV or similar.

DVB Ripping

I have a PlayTV add-on for the PlayStation 3 which enables me to record Freeview (DVB-T) broadcasts to the PS3 internal hard disk. I mostly use PlayTV to record films. To prevent the PlayStation 3 hard disk filling up with films I wanted to export, edit out any adverts and then serve the edited file from my DLNA server or author it to DVD.

This process does not re-encode the audio or video therefore it is fairly quick and the output is the same quality as the input.

Although I am using a PlayStation 3 as PVR and MPEG-2 TS (Transport Stream) file can be converted to a MPEG-2 PS (Program Stream) file using this process.

Export from PlayStation 3

First we need to move the recording from the PlayTV Library to the PS3 Home Menu. Start PlayTV, open the Library, select the recording and choose the Move to Home Menu option.

Quit PlayTV
Plug in an external (FAT32 formatted) USB drive to the PS3.
Go to Video on the PS3 Home Menu and select the recording you moved there earlier.
Select Copy from the Options screen and choose the external USB drive as the target.

Clean MPEG-2 TS and convert to MPEG-2 PS

Plug the USB drive into your Ubuntu workstation and copy the .m2ts file to your hard disk.

You will need to Project X to clean the MPEG-2 TS and convert it to MPEG-2 PS.

apt-get install project-x

Edit out the adverts

Start the Project X GUI and load your .m2ts file.

File -> Add and select your .m2ts file.

Now use Project X to add cut points to edit out any adverts.

De-multiplex the audio and video

When you have completed your edits you need to ‘demux’ the .m2ts file into two streams, one holding the audio (.mp2) and one holding the video (.m2v).

Click the Prepare >> button.
From the Process Window select the Action type to M2P
Click the start button and wait for the processing to finish.
Clock the ‘‘Process Windows’’ and quit Project X.

Re-multiplex the audio and video

The reason for the de-mux and then re-musing it to ensure the timecodes are correct, other the video will not playback correctly.

Install MJPEG tools.

apt-get install mjpegtools

Now we need to re-multiplex the audio and video to create a DVD compliant MPEG-2 PS file.

mplex -f 8 -o muxed-%d.mpg audio.mp2 video.m2v

The -f 8 option specifies a dvd-compliant stream that is compatible with dvdauthor. The -o option specifies the outfile, you can substitute muxed-%d.mpg with a more descriptive name if you like. %d is expanded to a number if mplex decides to split the output to several files, this usually happens when the recording contains commercials and is nothing to worry about.

Author DVD

The MPEG-2 PS file that has been created should be suitable for DVD authoring using DeVeDe. When adding MPEG-2 PS files created using the method above open the DeVeDe Advanced options and select This file is already a DVD/xCD-suitable MPEG-PS file in the Misc menu.