Mytharchive blues

Mytharchive is a MythTV tool that allows you to create DVDs from recorded programs. In theory, anyway.

I spent a frustrating weekend trying to create a DVD from recorded episodes of "Planet Earth"...what a fiasco!

• First frustration: a "skiplist" is not the same as a "cutlist". So, even if commercials get skipped while watching a recording in MythTV, that isn't enough to ensure that they will be skipped when creating the DVD as well. This distinction seems really unnecessary from a user's point of view. Anyway, you have to watch the recording in MythTV, then press "E" to enter Edit mode, then press "Z" to turn the skiplist into a cutlist.
  
  
• First attempt to use Mytharchive: After navigating a really disorganized and confusing multipage setup interface (par for the course in MythTV land), I get to the actual execution screen, which displays a Log of the activity. The log remains totally blank. No indication of what's happening, what's going wrong. Nothing. After some googling, I discover that this happens if there are some lock files from a previous mytharchive run hanging around. Once these are deleted, it will work correctly. Would be nice if Mytharchive would actually tell me that these lock files are preventing it from executing! Hey, maybe even offer to delete them for me. Crazy, I know.
  
  
• Second attempt to use Mytharchive: Unspecified error when trying to run ffmpeg. Googling led to this thread. Basically, I needed to replace some obscure support packages with "unstripped" variants (whatever the heck that means).
  
  
• Third attempt to use Mytharchive: After the above fix, I finally get a burned DVD...but it's unplayable in every DVD player I have access to, except my Macbook Pro. Even MythTV is unable to play its own DVD.
  
  
• Fourth attempt: I copied the ISO image from #3 over to my Macbook Pro, and used the OS X Disk Utility program to burn it to disc. This DVD is playable on all my computers (Mac, Windows and Ubuntu), but not on my relatively new Sony DVD player (which complains about "region resrictions", even though the disc is region-free.
  
  
• Fifth attempt: I tried to use devede to create the DVD ISO image, but gave up in extreme frustration after a few hours spent trying to get mythtranscode to produce copies of the video files with the commercials stripped out. This process is so arcane and unnecessarily difficult, it just makes me want to throw my machine out the window just thinking about it. Really, really, really user-unfriendly.
  

So, I'm stuck. I can make DVDs that can be played on computers, but not on my DVD player, but this process requires two computers and is far more hands-on than I was hoping for. My God, is it too much to ask that I just insert a blank DVD, tell it which recordings I want, and press "GO"? Apparently, yes. Yes it is.

And I didn't even get to the fact that all of the menu themes look like monkey-butt, and that the videos seem to suffer from really bad interlacing artifacts...ay, carumba!