| Issue 106: | ElGato Turbo.264 iPhone fails with commercial skip option | |
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What Version of iTiVo? 1.7.6 What Version of MacOS X? 10.4.11 What download format did you select? ElGato Turbo.264 iPhone What steps will reproduce the problem? 1. Select commercial skip option (did not select subtitles). 2. Select one show, then "Add Show to Queue". 3. Click "Download Now". Please provide any additional information below. Show is downloaded to the /tmp/iTiVo-<user>/ directory, then comskip does its thing. Next ElGato Turbo.264 application is launched, however encoding does not occur. Within a few seconds the process repeats by iTiVo downloading the show again, followed by comskip (up to the number of retries specified under advanced preferences). It appears that Turbo.264 may not able to locate the input file for encoding. Note that without the commercial skip option selected, Turbo.264 works without a hitch. Thanks for the great program! I travel quite a bit and was considering a SlingBox until I found iTiVo. Now I don't have to worry about the (very likely) possibility of hotel network congestion/problems resulting in a waste of money on the SlingBox.
May 31, 2009
Project Member
#1
yoav.yer...@gmail.com
Status:
Accepted
May 31, 2009
I do understand that you don't have the ElGato device, and that you are not getting paid for this work (though you really should set something up to permit contributions, as others have pointed out). I'm sure you're aware that your efforts are very much appreciated by a large number of people! As I do have the ElGato device, I am happy to try and assist you with debugging this problem. I tried a different show this morning in order to test whether it was just the one show, and to provide you with a clean log. The same problem occurred, so it would seem that it isn't related to certain files. After posting this defect last night, I did a bit more experimentation and managed to capture a download that had made it through comskip and mencoder before it was deleted. I took that iTiVoDLPipe file and manually fed it to Turbo.264, which worked fine. So it doesn't seem to be a problem with the input file itself. I also noted a -208 error related to Turbo.264 in the iTiVo.log, did a Google search to see what I might learn about it, and came across a thread in the TiVo Community Forum where you were discussing a somewhat similar problem with another iTiVo user. Seemed like the answer in that case was related to timing, and making sure that Turbo.264 was already running would resolve the problem. I tried that, to no avail. I should note that after checking out the encoded result of my manual feeding of the comskip/mencoder file to Turbo.264, there was enough of an audio sync problem (even though I did not select subtitles) that I would not enjoy viewing such shows. So even if you get this resolved, I probably won't use the feature (unless I discover that I am doing something incorrectly). Nevertheless, I am happy to provide any assistance that you desire. Per your request, I'm attaching a zip archive of my iTiVo.log. I did obscure the MAK by replacing it with all zeros. Oh, one more thing: I'm using an older Mac (G4 867MHz 1.5GB RAM), and wonder if that might be a contributor if this turns out to be timing/performance related. With this slower Mac the Turbo.264 USB dongle is an absolute necessity!
May 31, 2009
first, thanks for helping debug this. I'll answer the easy part first: The audio/video sync issues is a common problem that happens when the video is 'cut' first, then encoded (all the external encoders have to do this.. only mencoder can cut AND re-encode in one pass, and even that sometimes has issues). So I think there will be no useful workaround for this (unless mencoder internally adds support for elgato, or elgato allows using an edit list as part of their re-encode). As to the main problem. I'm gonna have to sit through the code and see if I can figure out a reason why this would happen. Nothing jumps to mind yet but hopefully I'll get it. I may ask you to test some stuff out for me if/when I do... |