Eh, it was time to upgrade MythTV anyway...

Okay, so like I posted last week, I'm interested in figuring out how to export videos from MythTV to my 5G iPod. Also like I last posted, Google lead me there and it wasn't very difficult after all is said and done. The good news is that I was right. Using the following ffmpeg command, I was easily able to take the default format that MythTV records in and export it to a format that my iPod could read.

  ffmpeg -vcodec xvid -b 300 -qmin 3 -qmax 5 \
-bufsize 4096 -g 300 -acodec aac -ab 96
-i /myth/tv/1011_20060820230000.mpg -s 320x240 -aspect 4:3 \
ipod_output.mp4

All I had to do was import the resulting file in iTunes & synchronize the device. Works like a champ.

The bad news is that I killed my MythTV install in the process of doing so.

It wasn't the above command that did the damage, it was my attempts to mess with Myth2ipod. I strongly recommend that any Knoppmyth user avoid it at all cost, if their system is newer than March 2006.

It really is my own fault. I should have taken a moment to look and see that the project hadn't been updated since March 2006. By comparison, I (was) running Knoppmyth R5C7, which was released May 2006. The Myth2ipod perl script is harmless enough, but it was the instructions for upgrading ffmpeg that did me in. Here's what the start of that looked like:

root@mythtv:~# apt-get install ffmpeg
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
The following extra packages will be installed:
libasound2 libasound2-dev libavcodec0d libavformat0d libc6 libc6-dev
libdc1394-13 libdirectfb-0.9-25 libgsm1 libogg-dev libogg0 libraw1394-8
libsdl1.2-dev libsdl1.2debian libsdl1.2debian-alsa libsysfs2 libvorbis-dev
libvorbis0a libvorbisenc2 libvorbisfile3 locales tzdata
Suggested packages:
libasound2-plugins libasound2-doc glibc-doc manpages-dev libraw1394-doc
Recommended packages:
libaa1-dev libdirectfb-dev libcucul-dev
The following packages will be REMOVED:
alsa-headers base-config initrd-tools libsdl1.2debian-oss
The following NEW packages will be installed:
libavcodec0d libavformat0d libdc1394-13 libdirectfb-0.9-25 libgsm1
libraw1394-8 libsdl1.2debian-alsa libsysfs2 tzdata
The following packages will be upgraded:
ffmpeg libasound2 libasound2-dev libc6 libc6-dev libogg-dev libogg0
libsdl1.2-dev libsdl1.2debian libvorbis-dev libvorbis0a libvorbisenc2
libvorbisfile3 locales
14 upgraded, 9 newly installed, 4 to remove and 633 not upgraded.
Need to get 17.3MB of archives.
After unpacking 4898kB disk space will be freed.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n] y

I had a bad feeling about it when I saw so many packages that were being replaced. In the end, when I went to reboot to validate nothing serious was broken, MythTV wouldn't go past the boot splash screen. (I can't even find a way to get the raw output from the boot, the box locks up just after the LILO screen disappears).

All the same, Knoppmyth's latest release is R5F7, published May 2007. So, I'll just rebuild with that (hopefully I can save all the TV shows I've recorded).

After I get MythTV up and running again, I'll hack that myth2ipod script and make it work with the modern version. I'll then post the results, after I get it cleanly done.