If you're interested in building your own personal video recorder (think TiVo on steroids) then you probably should consider MythTV.

The shell scripts from my page extract the video editor cutlist (NOT the commercials from the commercial detector) and remove the cut areas from the exported video. It requires only the basics installed with MythTV (mysql, mencoder, and standard shell functions such as echo and sed). The scripts use various codecs provided by mencoder to AVI format files.

To Install:

• Copy the file from the download page to your /usr/bin/ directory.
• Set it to be executable like this: "chmod +x /usr/bin/to264"
• In the KnoppMyth MythTV frontend hit the alt-s key to run the setup program. You can run this by entering "mythtv-setup" at the command line if you didn't install using KnoppMyth.
• Under the "General" option goto the last screen where you enter job queue jobs. Enter the following into one of the user job command lines (replace the xxxx with the name of the script you're using):
  /usr/bin/xxxx "%FILE%" "%TITLE% - %SUBTITLE%"
  The quotes ARE required. The file names will have spaces in them and the quote marks tell it what is part of the name and what is not. Enter whatever description you like for the job.
• Go back two screens using the back button and check the box to allow the job that you just entered.
• Move forward again to the last screen and hit the "Finish" button. Hit escape to exit from the setup program.

To Use: Edit your video if desired to remove parts you don't want. At the "view recordings" screen select a recording and hit the right arrow. Chose job options. The job description you entered in the setup screen should show as an option. Select it and the box will begin encoding your video. The result will be copied to the /myth/video directory. In the status screen is an option for job queues. You can see if the job has finished and if it worked correctly there.

07/31/2007: Added the to770.sh script. This script converts mythtv recordings to the reduced bitrate needed to view them on the Nokia 770.

05/01/2007: Warpme pointed out I made a mistake in the changes provided by Britney Fransen. There was one more reference to 29.97 fps that I didn't fix. Corrected.

02/21/2007: After much back and forth with Mopey from the forums we found a version that works on his KnoppMyth R5E10. Here's tomp4. It works the same as the other script except it uses the mpeg4 codecs instead of the h264 codecs. They seem to be missing for him!

02/16/2007: Britney Fransen noted that HD recordinds don't use 29.97 frames per second and sent me some code to use mencoder to detect the framerate. I put her code in. Thanks!

01/27/2007: I've changed the script to add a username and password for the mysql connection. It's correct for mythtv but this may require some editing.