Any Ideas?

[David Woodhouse]

On Wed, 2010-06-02 at 14:23 +0100, Ian macdonald wrote:
> Thank you for the information, that's good to know, thought it may
> have been something I was doing wrong, I will just keep running it
> through videora.  Though if anyone has a faster way perhaps using
> ffmpeg from the command line, as videora is windows only and takes a
> while considering it is only removing a few blank lines.

For flash downloads, get_iplayer will _already_ run ffmpeg over the
downloaded file to convert the container format from .flv to .mp4,
although it doesn't actually do any transcoding or image processing as
part of that. But it _could_ do so -- perhaps we should add a
'transcode' step which would optionally reformat to specific sizes and
transcode to specific codecs (PAL MPEG2, anyone?). The conversion from
flv to mp4 could happen as part of that stage instead of being done in
the RTMP downloader package.

It does kind of go against the grain though; I'd prefer to see
get_iplayer doing _less_ than it currently does. The actual download
support should move into get_flash_videos, leaving get_iplayer to do the
indexing and invoke g_f_v. And the PVR bits should live in a separate
tool which again works with g_f_v (and handles _all_ types of downloads
that g_f_v can support).
 
> I hope I have replied to this in a way that does not break the list rules.

The list doesn't have any special rules other than normal "netiquette"
-- don't top-post, don't quote more than need to, don't send HTML, don't
screw up threading, etc.

Not all of those will cause a message to be trapped for moderation, and
even if a message is moderated, I may let it through anyway (as I did
for fsck's email).

Since you seem to be asking, I suppose I'll risk annoying you by trying
to be helpful and actually giving you a straightforward answer... your
quotation does seem to be a little weird, which some might say would
violate the rule that your citations should clearly indicate who said
what.

You're quoting from two previous mails, so I would have expected your
mail to look a bit like this...

>====================<
On Tue, Jun 01 2010 at 16:52 +0100, fsck <fsckemail at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sat, May 29, 2010 at 10:18 PM, Ian macdonald <ianmac51 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I use Ubuntu and get_iplayer, up until a few months ago I could record
> > a show and it would tag the show in such a way that when I added it to
> > iTunes my appleTV would happily play it and show all the tags etc.
> > Now when I record a show, appleTV does not play video only audio, if I
> > run the file through videora the converted video works ok.
>
> Ian, it appear that the BBC changes to add a few blank lines in the mp4.
> i.e. now its 640x372 instead of 640x360. This causes playback issues for
> at least AppleTV and XBMC on XBOX.

Thank you for the information....
>====================<

Note how in my example, it's actually clear who said what. The
immediately previous email is quoted with one '>' on each line, and the
email before that is quoted with two of them (fsck added one when he
quoted your words in his reply, and your own reply should normally add
the second when you re-quote them). And there's a line above the start
of each citation saying who said it, and when.

Any half-decent email client should normally do all this for you,
surely?

If you look at the email you sent, for example in the archive at
http://lists.infradead.org/pipermail/get_iplayer/2010-June/000042.html
could you actually tell who said what unless you already knew?

In my example I've also trimmed the citations a bit. It's always best to
keep your quotations short, and repeat _only_ what's actually needed for
context. It's nice and polite that you said 'Hi All' in your first
email, but does it really need to be repeated every time? :)

It's not _that_ important though -- please don't think I'm picking on
you. You did seem to be asking; I wouldn't normally offer quite such
unsolicited advice :)

-- 
dwmw2