Today Sooz pointed out that our MythTV box did not tape something last night, and it turned out it was 99% full. This is not unsurprising as it has full seasons of The West Wing, 24, Sleeper Cell, Prison Break, Charmed (hers), Medium (hers), The Ghost Whisperer (hers) and much more on there. With it so chock full of stuff I needed to look into getting things off and onto DVD. After succesfully burning a few DVDs I figured I should blog about it as someone is sure to find my experience useful if they are in the same position.
On our MythTV box we are running version 0.18. I have not upgraded to 0.19, and with 0.20 allegedly around the corner, I figured I would until then to upgrade. As such, I cannot use the mucho-mucho-fantastico [MythArchive](https://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/MythArchive) for getting the recordings onto DVD. MythArchive solves this entire problem and allows you to select which things to burn, complete with DVD menus to boot. So, if you are on 0.18 and don’t have MythArchive, this is what you do.
You essentially have two options for getting video onto a DVD:
* Use [nuvexport](https://svn.forevermore.net/nuvexport/).
* Encode the video yourself and burn to DVD.
`nuvexport` is a utility that converts the `.nuv` files that MythTV saves its video in, into a format that someone has actually heard of. This problem goes away in later versions of MythTV and it just saves it as MPEG, but until then, you need to convert the .nuv file yourself. To do this, you can download nuvexport and it provides a simple command line menu to do the conversion.
If you are on MythTV 0.18, you need to grab nuvexport 0.2 from [the archive](https://forevermore.net/files/nuvexport/archive/), as 0.3 does not work correctly for this Myth version. Although this sounds great, I had problems with nuxexport, and Juski from #mythtv-users informed me that I probably needed a special, super cleverly compiled, custom ffmpeg. I went to get this, and they demand you grab it from Subversion. While groaning and checking it out, I discovered something new to avert such drudgery…
It turns out that if you are running one of the WinTV PVR-
You can use a tool called [tovid](https://tovid.berlios.de/en/index.html) to burn it to DVD, and this excellent little tool also includes support for menus and such. Although I tried to run my videos through tovid, it barfed and told me it could not understand what kind of audio was on the video file. So, it seems that my .nuv files are MPEG with some kind of freaky audio track on there.
To solve this I used [avidemux](https://fixounet.free.fr/avidemux/) to convert it to something that can live on a DVD just fine. To do this, install avidemux and simply click the *Auto* menu and select *DVD*. Then encode the video and feed it into tovid for all your DVD lovelyness.
This is not easy, and I suspect MythArchive should resolve all of these problems, but creating and burning DVD content on the normal desktop is notoriously difficult. I really hope this gets easier sometime soon. We have a pretty awesome stack, its just the user experience that needs consolidating. 🙂
