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Basically, it's an approach to build a small, cut to the bone, ready and easy to install VDR Linux distribution.
LinVDR is a complete, breathing Linux system smaller than 128 MB with a complete digital Video Disk Recorder (VDR) / Personal Video Recorder (PVR) and several plugins -- listed seperately below.
For easy access we installed additionaly the browser frontend VDR Admin and a Samba share for up- and downloading music or DVD images with Windows clients.

The base system is Debian Woody compatible (only compatible, not Debian Woody itself!) with the DVB driver from Convergence and Klaus Schmidingers unbeated Video Disk Recorder Software VDR.
All this Tom has mixed smoothly together, and I made the install system and installation programme -- suitable for normal users without Linux knowledge.

OK, sounds good. I have a XYZ tv card and a GeForce 10 with TV out. Lets start.

That's nice you have such expensive hardware, but it won't bring you a step closer to a running LinVDR system. We're here at digital TV, there is no purpose for any analog TV cards.

VDR was designed to work with so-called full featured DVB cards. This is a Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB) receiver card originally develloped from Technotrend. Hauppauge adopted these cards and labeled them WinTV DVB-s/C or Nexus.

The important point of this cards: Byside the receiving unit, where you can read a MPEG-2-Stream, they're equipped with a DSP chip working as MPEG-2 decoder and OSD creator. This DSP decodes the steam, overlays the menu and put the result to the composite video out of the DVB card.

This means: You don't need a graphic card with TV out, your full featured DVB card already has one (and only this one is used by VDR).

But you need only one of that expensive (> $150) full featured DVB cards. If you want to install a second one, e.g. to enable you to receive more channels at the same time, you can use a so-called budget card.

These buget cards have no TV out and no MPEG-2 decoder, making them a lot cheaper (around $70).

Type Vendor Model Class Price DVB-S Hauppauge WinTV Nexus-s Full Featured abt. $250 DVB-S TechnoTrend DVB-S Sat PCI
Rev. 1.3, 1.5, 1.6 Full Featured abt. $190 DVB-T TechnoTrend DVB-T Rev. 1.2 Full Featured abt. $250 DVB-C Hauppauge WinTV DVB-C Full Featured abt. $300 DVB-C TechnoTrend DVB-C Rev. 2.1 Full Featured abt. $230 DVB-S Hauppauge WinTV Nova-S Budget abt. $125 DVB-S TechnoTrend Budget DVB-S Budget abt. $90 DVB-T TechnoTrend DVB-T 1300 Budget abt. $110 DVB-C TechnoTrend DVB-C Rev. 1.0 Budget abt. $110

To cut it short: You need one full featured card with MPEG-2 decoder (Technotrend style, supported by the DVB driver of Kernel 2.6) and any number of budget cards (supported by the same drivers). No way to use your graphic adapter or analog TV card, if you're looking for an analog PVR, try e.g. MythTV.

VDR Version and Plugins VDR 1.3.17 with enAIO-Patch and this plugins:

• Autotimer-Edit 0.1.4 new
• DVD-Burn 0.0.5 new
• Clock 0.0.5b1 update
• Console 0.6 update
• DVD 0.3.5b06 (without CSS support)
• EPG-Search 0.0.3 new
• Femon (signal strength) 0.1.6 update
• Games 0.6.1 update
• GraphLCD 0.1.1 update
• GraphTFT 0.0.8 new
• Hello 0.1.0
• Image (Diashow) 0.2.2 update
• LCD-Proc 0.0.10 update
• Mailbox 0.3 update
• Manual 0.0.2 (german only) new
• Media-MVP 0.1.5 new
• Media-MVP-Server new
• M-LCD 0.0.4 update
• MP3 0.9.8 update
• MPlayer 0.9.8 update
• OSD-Demo 0.1.0
• Osd-PiP Plugin 0.0.7 update
• OSD-Teletext 0.3.1 update
• Pilot 0.0.7 new

My brother and I wrote a linux kernel driver for the em8400 chip, i.e. Netstream card, for convergence (see this link and this one). The driver implements the linux DVB API (described at linuxtv.org), but we can't publish anything because of NDA agreements with Sigma Designs. The card is very nice and has a very good MPEG decoder. I don't see why they don't want it published as open source.

What they mean with "Ip over MPEG" is nothing else than IP over DVB - Digital Video Broadcast. DVB is the digital television standard in Europe, and NOKIA is a major player in it, as is Fujitsu-Siemens and others. There exist three DVB transmission styles:

• DVB-T (terrestrial, antenna)
• DVB-C (cable)
• DVB-S (sattelite)

and a similare audio-standard, named DAB - Digital Audio Boradcasting. DAB will replace the FM tuners over the years, and DVB will replace the conventional TV broadcastings.

Still we do not know what "IP over MPEG" is, right ? Well, DVB transmissions consist of a subset of MPEG2. I think this is what they meant with this. I have such a DVB-Card in one of my PCI slots. Together with my USB Host-To-Host bridge, my D-Link NIC this is the third (never asked for, since I use DVB for Television only) network card I have in my system. The DVB standard not only transmits audio/video but also (since we are talking digital, you guessed it...;-)) generic information, as in this case, TCP/IP packets. With this it is possible to use a sattelite (with the SAT version) as network-downstream. This still would require the upstream to go through a conventional method, however. I guess this will change in the next ten years, and DVB will become a standard way to access the Internet...

What is especially interesting are the things going on "behind the scenes", especially from an Open Source point of view:

• NOKIA is a major player/contributor to the MHP - Multimedia Home Platform specification/project.

  MHP is a standard, that will incooperate DVB but make it a real standard. At the moment each broadcaster tries to enforce its own modifications and incompatibilities on the users (Germanies largest broadcaster did so, some French pay-channel did, etc.), just as we know similare practices from M$.

• Now, another important developer of MHP is noone else than Convergence.De AKA LinuxTV.Org, AKA DirectFB (a related project is Diet LibC, for the interested).

  LinuxTV.Org also wrote and/or hosts the important (GPL'ed) software for the DVB cards on Linux, both the v4l compatible TV drivers as well as the IP over MPEG ;-) driver. In addition they host a very cool Linux project, named VDR, which makes a harddisk-video recorder out of any linux compatible PC with one ore more DVB card(s).

BTW: see also DirectFB stuff on Freshmeat and for Gods sake, have a look at this amazing GTK+ desktop with full aplpha blending or the "rootless X Server"(1) (2) or "ten MPEG Videos playing at once, blended, without framedrops". You will find their GTK+ patches here and the DVB stuff here

All in all this is perfect for embedded systems and desktop boxes as well as it will be for full blown deksktops. (Linux desktop without X, digital video and audio broadcast based on free and open standards etc.)

Just to be clear: the Digital Convergence named in the story isn't the same Digital Convergence which gave people a hard time for messing with their "CueCat" foo.

Specs are a way to standardize a platform so that multiple efforts can strive for a common goal. Specifications, however, do not impede on proactive donations of GPL/BSD software.

Convergence Integrated Media, one of the companies involved, is contributing to Free Software via DirectFB which seems to be quite impressive.

In any case the corporate adoption of GNU/Linux as a viable platform should help spread copyleft fever. This is a Good Thing.

Convergence, the company behind linuxtv.org, was finally not taken over by Lineo but is still looking for investors.

Convergence is a founding member of the TV Linux Alliance and will continue to fight for Open Source software in our future TV sets because we don't want big brother in our living rooms.

greetings

swann