We have DVDs!
One thing that my home-built PVR (MythTV) never did very well was archive television shows. How do I know that? The 80 episodes of "Good Eats" clogging my hard drive were a good indication. Unlike Desperate Housewives or Monk which lose their appeal once you know the story, Good Eats is more of an instructional cooking show. Something you want to watch again when faced with a menacing kitchen and a new recipe.
So, Good Eats was not about to be deleted from our PVR. We would not put our future souffles, home-made cheeses, egg-nogs, dough, doughnuts, barbecue, and crepes in such danger. At the same time, however, we were rubbing up against the confines of our storage capacity. Something had to give, and it turns out that something was me.
Since Friday I'd invested perhaps 30 hours in getting my Linux PVR to correctly record DVDs. What does correctly mean? It means correctly identifying commercials and removing them from the program. It means correctly grabbing short animations from each program to use as animated DVD menus. It means getting audio and video synchronized on the DVD. It means auto-generating the DVD menus correctly, with submenus. It means wrapping the whole 15-step process into a nice script that is easily usable and hard to mess up. In the Linux "Do It Yourself" world, this stuff is encompassed by the term: "Wife Friendly" -- the holy grail of Linux DVDing.
Well...
My MythTv Show archival is rapidly approaching wife friendly. It just passed functional yesterday evening. We've burnt 18 episodes of one show -- i.e. thank goodness we did not have to suffer the shame of backing them up to VHS tape for our personal use instead of DVD.
Hearing my computer hard drive churn in the background as 6 more episodes are plumped onto disc (that's right, sans commercials most episodes are 20 minutes -- that's 6 of the puppies on a 2 hours DVD at full quality) I suddenly realized -- intermized with the adrenaline of success -- that I am horrificly tired.
-Ed
So, Good Eats was not about to be deleted from our PVR. We would not put our future souffles, home-made cheeses, egg-nogs, dough, doughnuts, barbecue, and crepes in such danger. At the same time, however, we were rubbing up against the confines of our storage capacity. Something had to give, and it turns out that something was me.
Since Friday I'd invested perhaps 30 hours in getting my Linux PVR to correctly record DVDs. What does correctly mean? It means correctly identifying commercials and removing them from the program. It means correctly grabbing short animations from each program to use as animated DVD menus. It means getting audio and video synchronized on the DVD. It means auto-generating the DVD menus correctly, with submenus. It means wrapping the whole 15-step process into a nice script that is easily usable and hard to mess up. In the Linux "Do It Yourself" world, this stuff is encompassed by the term: "Wife Friendly" -- the holy grail of Linux DVDing.
Well...
My MythTv Show archival is rapidly approaching wife friendly. It just passed functional yesterday evening. We've burnt 18 episodes of one show -- i.e. thank goodness we did not have to suffer the shame of backing them up to VHS tape for our personal use instead of DVD.
Hearing my computer hard drive churn in the background as 6 more episodes are plumped onto disc (that's right, sans commercials most episodes are 20 minutes -- that's 6 of the puppies on a 2 hours DVD at full quality) I suddenly realized -- intermized with the adrenaline of success -- that I am horrificly tired.
-Ed
posted by Ed at 8:11 PM
1 Comments:
What, 30 minute meals not good enough for ya?!
Actually, I find most of what Alton makes a little out of the everyday range. Who really has time to make thier own bacon?
I would LOVE to do it, don't get me wrong, but most of what he does is very time consuming.
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