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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.
... until this gets canned by mpaa/riaa/tv industry because it permits easy sharing of shows?
Anyone know of a bake-off between one of these and a TiVo or a Replay?
Image quality, integration, "intelligence", listings, UI, ease-of-use, remote-control support, etc?
Frankly I want a no-brainer to handle my TV recording; not to have to put together a perl script just to record "Naked Chef".
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
But I already own a TiVo!!!
Which runs Linux...which makes me wonder why TiVo hasn't had to release any of their source code...someone really should look into that...
Anyway, this of course is A Good Thing, as its yet one more place that Linux couldn't go before. Every day, there are fewer and fewer places Linux can't meet the needs of a Windows user...it's only a matter of time, though I do believe interoperability between programs/the OS needs to be improved before we hold a Prime Time showdown between Linux and Windows...
Does anyone know if this application support BTTV cards? If not, then it's not much use for us North Americans.
There are TONS of DVB channels watchable. But you need a large Satellite Dish. In Europe it's mainly Ku sattellite band.
The TiVo works better. Looks like it belongs in a A/V rack. Has a much better interface. More features. Integrates amazingly well in almost any setup.
So far all these do-it-yourself PVR "solutions" have fallen way short of being a TiVo killer. Anyone that actively uses a TiVo can tell you that.
They will not you silly. It is being done in a civilized country (in terms of copyright laws that is).
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
according to the site I see 3 words that grab my attention as interesting (and also threatening). ON-DISK EDITING. For one, i think this will be a great feature, however I can see where MPAA or broadcasters could see this in a not-so-brilliant light. Download it soon fellas, before the MAN gets it.
Ummm...This shouldn't really hurt TiVo too much. For the average user, it's just too complicated. The overhead of building your own linux box is a signifcant one. When you add in that it doesn't come in a pretty package like the TiVo.
I also wouldn't discount the effort necessary to build a public database of showtimes. I would doubt that entertainment companies would just give open source developers an easy way to pull this information automatically. It probably wouldn't be too hard to screen scrape from some other source, but there are legal issues with that, not to mention the hassle whenever the format of those sources changes.
In the unlikely event that this does start to threaten TiVo's business, TiVo has plenty of patents on timeshifting video and the like that could probably kill off this product.
TiVo's not going anywhere...
"Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos!"
Yeah! Stupid competition! Don't those Free Software people know that companies should be entitled to profits forever? They've already innovated once, how much more do they have to keep working?
If TiVo or ReplayTV want to compete with this product, they're free to. Just because it's open source doesn't mean it's immune from competition. Profits are not guarenteed in a free economy.
And no, just because a company is going out of business doesn't give it the right to sue everyone around it an attempt to bring them down too. That sort of thing is irresponsible to society at large.
"Save the whales, feed the hungry, free the mallocs" -- author unknown
To put things in a bit of perspective: This is an awesome achievement and these guys should be congratulated many times over for the achievement. It is *way* cool!!
However, it is *not* competition to TiVo outside of the handful of geeks that may choose to do it themselves over buying the off the shelf solution provided by TiVo and ReplayTV.
First, the Linux VDR based solution is not a no-brainer installation. Not by any stretch of the imagination. You have to deal with obtaining the correct hardware configuration, install all the software correctly, etc,etc,etc. Even if someone were to pick it up and sell it as an off the shelf, preconfigured unit it will still have significant maintenance issues above and beyond, say, a TiVo.
This is not a criticism-- just a recognition that the market for a TiVo and the primary market for this software is very different.
Most of the folks I know with a TiVo do not have the knowledge or the time to deal with such a solution.
Frankly, even with the knowledge an awful lot of folks aren't going to have the time or aren't going to see blowing the time on building out such a thing as being a useful investment.
Personally, I would rather pay $500 to TiVo and be done with it than have to screw around with getting all of the different random bits inline to make the Linux VDR solution work!
Finally, the TiVo provides a level of seamless integration that will not be achieved in the GPL VDR solution for a long time. A lot of the channel and scheduling information isn't available via public channels without doing a boatload of parsing and screen scraping. Even then, it'll change over time and break often. TiVo and Replay have the distinct advantage of having paid the big $$$ for data feeds that provide this data in a machine readable format.
Paying the $$$ to TiVo/Replay buys a lot more than just some software and hardware. It buys a service, a data feed, and a company to back the whole package. For a lot of the market, all of that must be included before something can be considered competition!
"I wonder if they'd be willing to sell feeds to individuals..."
:)
You could always try to buy said information from TiVo at 10-15 dollars a month
"My God...It's full of ads!" -Fry, about the Internet, Futurama
Actually, that might be true for a Standalone Tivo, but the DirecTivo combo box captures the raw DirecTV stream, which is 480x480.