PVR tinkering

I decided to give the GB-PVR software a try. The installation was fairly straight forward but overly complex. Once the program was up and running I found most of the buttons on the remote control didn't work or they were doing the wrong things. I wont blame the program for that though, it was probably me not selecting a remote control to use in the configurator. Remote control issues aside, the real kicker was nearly everything I tried to do resulted in a memory exception error so I gave up and uninstalled.

I tried out some AutoGK for video compression too. I tried it out on an existing xvid that was bigger than I wanted. AutoGK has preset file sizes you can aim for. I chose 350 MB (original was 995 MB), but it just spent the day going in loops because it couldn't get the file small enough, so it kept lowering the resolution until it was finally unviewable. Recompressing an already compressed file might not be a fair test so I will give it another go on a raw mpeg2 file soon. On the plus side it does give good feedback about what it is doing and how long it expects things to take.

I also finally got around to installing UltraVNC on the pvr so I can check on video compression progress from the other room. Don't know why I didn't do it earlier, just lazy I guess.

I've been using Media Portal's Video Editor plugin to remove ads from recordings. Somtimes it can be a bit buggy starting or it just drops out while you're marking the cut points and you have to start again. For the most part it works well though.