PVR For Linux

amix writes "After two years of hard work the final 1.0 of VDR (Video Disk Recorder) has been released under the GPL. VDR is Linux based VCR software for digital TV cards (DVB, the Linux driver supports cable, sat and terrestrial cards), the new TV standard in Europe and also in use at several places in the United States. VDR is a fully networkable digital video recorder (implemented as daemon on port 2001) with optional MP3, DVD and 'MPlayer' based video-codec replay plus much more. It features "timeshifting", an incredibly comfortable OSD, functions to make editing/cleaning-up the streams easier and is controllable by LIRC, keyboard, telnet/ssh, WWW (cgi) or dedicated utilities. It can be used natively on a TV, with standard v4l tools or the KVDR KDE frontend.. You have an old PC? Add one (up to four) DVB card and you got a cheap multimedia center. Here are the screenshots. " A very impressive project indeed.

Comments

No DirecTV or Dish

[nvrrobx]

Unfortunately, in the US, there is no card that works for DirecTV or Dish like that Siemens card. :(

Re:No DirecTV or Dish

[Cramer]

DirectTV: NEVER (proprietary DSS system)

Dish: Maybe. It's at least the DVB standard.

Re:No DirecTV or Dish

[Anonymous Coward]

Broadlogic ABA-1020 cards will do the trick. Linux drivers exists in at least 2 labs for them.

Yeah!

[NetJunkie]

Oh, you mean like this?

http://www.tivo.com/linux/index.html

Mirror site

[WankersRevenge]

I managed to get a peek at the site before it got slashdotted. I only got to view one page but here it is on my own server:

http://www.jezner.com/slashdot/vdrs.html

Need Digital TV Support for the U.S.

[-tji]

This is a great project.. a fully open sourced PVR. If I lived in Europe, I would be all over it.

For use in the U.S. a Digital TV receiver card such as the HiPix or the AccessDTV.

Depending on how the hardware interfaces with the control software, it would be excellent if it could be made to work with U.S. cards.

Modest HW

[cholokoy]

From a description on the site:

PC Hardware

The PC hardware I have chosen to build the Video Disk Recorder consists of the following components:

Motherboard ASUS P5A
BIOS version 1.009
HDD 37.5GB IBM DPTA353750 U-DMA-66 9ms (running with on-board EIDE
controller, so I'm not using the full U-DMA-66 speed)
AMD K6-II 450MHz
128 MB RAM
simple VGA card (no X running on this system)
Longshine LCS-8038TX network card (using the RTL8139)
3.5" floppy drive
3 Siemens PCI-DVB Sat (digital satellite receiver card)

Re:bye bye tivo

[ryanvm]

bye bye tivo

Yeah right. Unless your grandma can build one of these, I wouldn't count on them replacing TiVos or Replays anytime soon.

i didn't see if there's a project to build a public database of showtimes/channels for people to get. shouldn't be that challenging.

There's probably 3000+ different cable lineups in the U.S. alone. I wouldn't count on a reliable source of this guide data just magically appearing from the open source community. However, you might be able to use the Guide+ data that gets broadcasted on PBS stations in the middle of the night. For that matter, I can't figure out why nobody has hacked TiVo to use it.

Re:So can I still use my bttv card?

[Nullsmack]

Actually there are a fair number of FTA mpeg2 streams on Ku band over here.. though C band isn't quite devoid of FTA mpeg2.

I know of no DVB cards that would take an authorization card for pay sat. around the USA though.

ALSO, I was going to make a comment like this.. If this project is going to support 'regular' analog tv cards as well.. like my wintv-dbx.. then I'll have to set up a box dedicated to this sometime or another. It would help if it could do the serial port control thingy, 'cause I intend on getting sat. when I move out of my apartment :P

To clear up any misconceptions

[mocm]

VDR is for DVB cards only. DVB is the European standard for digital satellite, cable and terrestial
reception. The drivers for DVB cards can be found at www.linuxtv.org.
There are mainly two types of cards available paired with the respective tuner for DVB-S, DVB-C or DVB-T. One is a full featured card containing an MPEG2 decoder and the other a budget card which only delivers the transport stream from the respective transmitter. The latter are very good for Internet via sat, cable or terrestial sources because they can deliver a full transport stream.
The DVB standard provides an electonic program guide (EPG) which allows VDR to get information about the programming and transmission times.
So it differs from Tivo because it doesn't need to encode the programs and gets the programming information directly from the respective providers. Replay is done via the MPEG decoders of the full featured cards, so you always need one to
have the full benefit of VDR, it also uses the TV out of the DVB card so no graphics card is required. Of course, you can use a software decoder to decode the transport stream that comes from the card, but that is not yet implemented in VDR.
There is also the possibility to add a common interface (CI) to the DVB card, so that you can use a common acces module (CAM) to decode encrypted channels using the smartcard you get from your provider.

Re:To clear up any misconceptions

[Lumpy]

and to add one last part...

It is damn hard getting a DVB card in the states that will work for the states analog channels. (cince 99% of all cable TV and off-air tv in the USA is still analog for a portion of the channel selection.. Yes kids, the channels that are low in number are still analog even with your digital cable.)

So this project is pretty much 100% useless inthe USA... which sucks as they have it flat out awesome....

to do this with US equipment you need a Hollywood+ mpeg decoder card that put out raw video to a TV and a bttv878 card with nuppelvideo.

a bit better than VHS quality in a tivoesque way by using mplayer to play it. (yes fullscreen in mono or stereo, no not 1080i with full 30 channel surround sound for the video-freaks)

slap a simple web based interface to set record times. (I know it is horribly difficult to enter day of the week and time and name of show into a text form and causes hemmorages in most people.. but the few of us that have mutated to the point where this doesn't cause death, it works for well)

I just hope that someone makes a DVB card that works in the states with the analog stuff we have and will probably have for the next 15 years.

Re:how long...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, and the MPAA tried to make them illegal. Luckily, they lost.

Concerning the US, DMCA and ATSC

[mocm]

Of course, VDR won't have any problems with the DMCA because it is a German project and there are very few DVB transmissions in the US. Still, it could be adapted to the ATSC standard provided there will be any cards for PC and information for the drivers available. This seems to be highly doubtful since there is currently talk about preventing any unauthorized recording of ATSC transmissions. I think there is more information about that on the EFF's web site.
The driver for the Linux cards support NTSC and there have been reports by people on the linux-dvb mailing list at www.linuxtv.org that they work for the few US DVB satellite transmissions. Although it seems to be hard to get the hardware in the US.

Re:Congrats

[gwernol]

Now I just need to find a way to buy a personal data feed from Tribune Media Services, and there's a networkable, build-your-own TiVo! I wonder if they'd be willing to sell feeds to individuals...

In a former life I worked for a company that worked closely with TMS using their data feeds. I doubt they'd have the slightest interest in selling feeds to individuals. They don't have the infrastructure to support that kind of program and I can't imagine a model that would make sense for them. They sell the feeds for a great deal on money and its a primary business for them.

I think a better model is an open source database a la freedb where users contribute schedule information. However because of the time sensitive nature of schedules this might not work too well.

Tivo's not going away any time soon

[Primer]

This will not kill the tivo, or be something you'll be able to setup to replace a tivo.

First of all, afaik, satellite transmissions are already mpeg encoded, so all this thing does is dump the mpeg to the hd, no need to encode. That's why he's able to list an AMD k6-450 in the system requirements. I'm sure it could get by on less if it also had a comparable mpeg decoder.

The tivo must encode to mpeg using hardware. I know of no hardware that can do this in Linux. (If you know of any, please let me know). The tivo also has a dedicated mpeg decoder. This is how the Tivo is able to get by using a 50Mhz PPC processor.

So, as soon as there's a tuner card with on board mpeg encoding (In Linux), and the availability of TV listings that can be downloaded for free, and is brain dead simple to setup, I don't see the tivo going away any time soon.

Re:bye bye tivo

[protactin]

XMLTV works reliably well for retrieving, parsing and sorting TV guide data, at least in the UK.
As you can guess, it stores listings in XML, with a well documented DTD..

I know they also now have new backends for grabbing TV listings for the USA and Canada which I have quickly tried successfully.

Re:Linux needs drivers for Creative's MPEG-2 PVR

[Anonymous Coward]

SVCD.