I currently record all my shows in MythTV using a couple of Hauppauge PVR-[12]50’s. This works great, but I sometimes record shows originally filmed in HD and they show up as letterboxed 4:3 shows. This isn’t a problem when I play them back on a standard def 4:3 display, but when played back on my widescreen displays they end up having a black border all they way around the show. I know I can just use the playback menu ‘adjust fill’ option and set it to ‘full’ in order to fix this, but that has to be done every time I start playback. I wish there was a way for MythTV to automatically detect this situation and automatically select the correct playback fill.
To handle this situation, I created a small ‘user job’ script that I run automatically on the shows that I know will be recorded in a letterboxed format. It takes the original 4:3 mpeg2 recording and crops 60 pixels off the top and bottom and re-encodes it to a 16:9 aspect mpeg2 file. It then replaces the original file with the transcoded version, updates the mythconverg database to reflect the changed file settings, runs mythcommflag to rebuild the seektable (ffw/rwd doesn’t work without this) and finally runs a lossless mythtranscode with the –mpeg2 option (length of the recording is incorrectly shown without this).
The following is that script… (more…)