vdr2xvid

I used this script as a VDR hook to automatically convert my recordings to Xvid files which I could then play on my mobile phone.

It accomplishes the conversion with the following steps:

• Check if the recording is on a black-list. Usually you don't want to convert all of your recordings
• Demultiplex it using ProjectX. That ensures that your recording is undamaged and synced.
• Calculate the maximum video size while respecting the aspect ratio and a restriction to 307200 pixels (maximum on my then mobile phone LG KU990 Viewty).
• Re-encode to Xvid (optionally using a two-pass encoding).
• Remove temporary files.

To run this script for every new recording you can create a shell script which calls this Python script. The shell script itself has to be in the recording-hooks directory of your VDR configuration (/etc/vdr/recording-hooks/ on Debian):

#!/bin/bash
# Use Latin1 as charset
export LC_ALL=de_DE
# Run vdr2xvid nicely in the background
nice -n 19 /pfad/zu/vdr2xvid.py $1 $2 &

Happy video watching!

Download: vdr2xvid.py (License: GPL 2)