Maintained by: Edward Hughes IV

Project spawned from reference at: https://monopedilos.com/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=hdpvrcutter.pl

This script is intended to be used to export recordings from MythTV, specifically those created by the Hauppauge HD-PVR, and/or are in H.264 format. The script provides the best results of the many options that were tried up to the time of its discovery/creation, mainly in-sync audio/video. While the results are great in that respect, the cutting is only reliably performed on keyframes. If the cut-point specified is not explicitly on a keyframe, mkvmerge seems to choose the nearest keyframe to the specified position. It seems that herein lies the difficulty working with H.264 recordings and with that said, the author still finds this to be the most effective method for removing unwanted portions of a recording made by MythTV.

Update 2012/02/05: Much more usage and an update to the latest version of mkvmerge (v5.2.1) has shown promising results with non-keyframe cut-points. Additional testing with the recently merged 'nomyth' branch, which is aimed at allowing the user to supply the cutlist to edit non-MythTV stored videos, has worked quite well with arbitrarily specified cut-points. As usual, YMMV.

Several parameters are required at run-time. The minimum are:

--dest, the export destination directory
--recordings, the mythtv recordings directory
--tempdir, a temporary working directory
--title or --basename, to select the recording to be     edited/exported
--cutlist or --passwd, to provide the cutlist

If you are using the script as a MythTV user job, you will need the database password for access. There is a --jobid option to provide additional feedback in the MythTV job queue. Depending on your system configuration, the script might also require the hostname where the mythtv database resides, the database name, the database user, and possibly a subtitle (this will be necessary if exporting television episodes, not necessary for movies). Run 'hdpvrcutter --help' for a complete list of options.

To run the script from within MythTV you must setup a user job. See the MythTV wiki for help on the method(s) for doing so. The command you will need to enter will need to be something like this:

/path/to/hdpvrcutter.pl --passwd=myMythTVpassword --jobid=%JOBID% --title="%TITLE%" --subtitle="%SUBTITLE%" --tempdir=/path/to/temp --dest=/path/to/dest/ --recordings=/path/to/mythtv/recordings