At some point you will want to archive your TV recordings for safe keeping. There are however some complications with this, due to the way Digital TV content is held on your hardrive. MythTV stores its recordings in the "/mnt/video" directory by default. You will find files in here with a .nuv file extension and a long complicated name based on the recording schedule. These files are in nupple video format.They are effectively MPEG-2 files with special markings to help digital TV cope with any dropped information during broadcast. To archive these files to DVD they will need to be converted into normal MPEG-2 files that are compliant with the DVD standard.

The process to archive these to DVD involves the use of several external tools as MythTV does not yet have a DVD burning option. The steps are as follows:

Please note that from MythTV 0.20 onwards mythtv has a built in archive and DVD burn application.

1. Split DVB File with ProjectX
Project X takes a collection of DVB stream files and  concatenates them into one big project. You can trim the files here also. It will then create synchronisation marks between the audio and video. You can use the default settings.

KStart-Multimedia->Media Editing-> ProjectX

Add File to queue  ->
Delete from queue ->
Move file up          ->
Move file down      ->
Set output dir       ->

Now you can add cut points in the stream. Use the blue arrow buttons to jump forward and backward in the stream. use the "I<"  ">I"  buttons to jump between cut points. Use the " " and " -" butons to add cut points. Two consecutive cut points will turn an area on the stream progress bar green. The green areas will be output to your final stream file.

Preview Window   ->




Stream cut points
Green means keep ->

Pink buttons
" "  add cut point
"-"   del cut point

                          Click "QuickStart"  ---------->

Project X will now write out a .m2v and .mp2 files to your output directory

2. Create DVD MPEG-2 stream
We now can convert the above output video(m2v) and audio stream (mp2) generated by projectX to a DVD compatible stream. We use the mplex command, which is part of mjpegtools. You will then have a .mpg file with combined audio and video all nicely synchronised.
 
>mplex -f 8 -o 1.mpg 1.m2v 1.mp2

3. Create a DVD Image with KDE DVDAuthor
KDE DVD Author will allow you to create very nice DVD's complete with animated menus. You do not need to compile it. Just download and click on the installer.kmdr icon and KDE will install it. KDE DVDAuthor is a KDE Kommander application.

KDE DVD\Author requires the following packages
DVD Author, ffmpeg, lsdvd, normalize


Just follow the steps in the wizard, adding in the video , audio and images files that it asks for. It wil then generate  a  DVD ISO image once it completes.

4. Burn DVD image using K3B
K3B includes a wizard to burn DVD ISO images. You will find it under the Tools pull down.
Tools-> Burn DVD ISO image. Just load up the ISO image from step 3. and you are done.