Recording TV: broken indexes, the endpos flag, and the recording status line

Hello,

For several years I have been using a script I wrote and made available
(http://mrj.bpa.nu/tvr) to record analog TV using the mjpegtools package.
I recently got a digital TV card, and want to use and release an upgraded
script that adds digital transport stream recording, hopefully using mplayer.

The script allows you to record both interactively, where you hopefully see
the recording time and status tick by, in mplayer/mencoder's normal way,
and stopped with a 'q' or 'CTRL-c', and in a scheduled (one-off and recurrent)
mode that starts recording at given time (using 'at' and 'cron'), recording
for a specified number of minutes.

Using

   mplayer -endpos <secs> -dumpstream -dumpfile <file>.ts dvb://<ch>

records fine, though the endpos parameter does not work, and even when endpos
is left off I see no recording progress line (which seems never to be shown
when using dumpstream).

Recording using

   mencoder -ovc copy -oac copy -endpos <secs> -vf harddup -o <file>.ts dvb://<ch>

instead creates a file into which you can't seek, needing its index fixed
using a second mencoder run using -forceidx.  However both endpos and the
recording progress line work.  I added the harddup filter to prevent
mencoder complaining about duplicate frames.

Can anyone suggest how I can record a properly indexed transport stream
while having the endpos option available, and hopefully also having
recording progress available (turned off with a -quiet flag)?

Thank you.