another Comcast head-end goes digital

[tmetro-blu-5a1Jt6qxUNc at public.gmane.org (Tom Metro)]

Bill Bogstad wrote:
> The script has issues with recordings that have
> both English and Spanish/Descriptive audio tracks.  It would merge
> both of them into a single track.

I ran into this today using my simplified mencoder script. It didn't 
merge the two tracks, but instead seemed to use the Spanish track. 
Probably picks the lowest numbered audio stream.

The main show I recorded actually had normal English audio, but at the 
end of the recording was about 30 seconds of the next show, and it was 
all in Spanish. Apparently for the main show both tracks were identical.


> mplayer -identify may give more info on what it sees in the stream.
> 
> On my stuff it shows this:
> ID_VIDEO_ID=0
> ID_AUDIO_ID=0
> 
> And you may be able to use -aid, or -ausid or -alang to only deal with
> one stream.

I see VLC is able to identify the language of the two streams, so 
mplayer/mencoder should be able to as well.

-alang, which lets you prioritize the audio stream based on a language 
code, looks like it should do the trick. Not sure if this switch applies 
to mencoder as well as mplayer.

Ideally there should just be a switch to have mencoder transcode all the 
streams from the original, preserving the same ordering.

I'm not sure how or if mvpmc handles multiple audio streams.

mplayer -identify seems to output a slew of repeated identifiers, but it 
includes:

ID_AID_2306_LANG=spa
ID_AID_2305_LANG=eng

So adding "-alang eng" should do it. So far, seems like it works.

  -Tom

-- 
Tom Metro
Venture Logic, Newton, MA, USA
"Enterprise solutions through open source."
Professional Profile: http://tmetro.venturelogic.com/