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.

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.

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.