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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.
finally, a great build yourself TIVO setup. 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.
i'm sure a decent setup HDD, video card, and processor is near the price of a tivo, but this lends it self to much much more.
i can't see any DMCA implications, as the intent of the software isn't to distribute copies (that have been unencrypted via breaking a digital encryption method) to other users.
Sounds like I either need to start porting, or install Leenooks!
Looks like they have really thought this one through. There are several really cool features which push the DVR market forward and have been long overdue
- What's on next? button
- The ability to create an edited version of a recording
- Directories to hold recordings
- How much space is left on my hard drive indicator
- And I don't even want to get into network functionality.
Note to Tivo, please add these functionalites to the next system upgrade
One of the things which makes the Linux VDR project slightly easier (?) to implement is that the DVB card they're using as a tuner outputs MPEG-2 to the system. Thus, no messy (and cpu intensive) video input and number crunching. This Digital VCR product from Creative has an MPEG-2 encoder chip on-board, and outputs MPEG-2. It can either use it's own tuner OR it will control your cable box/sat receiver via IR commands. And it's only $99. That's not a typo. I'm not claiming it's output will be as good as a Tivo/DVB/whatever, but at 640x480 resolution, it's a step in the right direction.
And it's no longer vaporware -- I picked one up at CompUSA last week (in NYC - 38th & 5th location).
Now, who's up for tearing this thing apart and creating some linux drivers?!
Yes, for now. The problem with these do-it-yourself PVR solutions is that there are technical hurdles. Every few months, I get the latest Video4Linux driver for my Matrox Rainbow Runner, and try to get them to do something. After an hour, I give up in frustration. I guess I'm just too old or stupid or something for this shit.
But once this stuff gets mature, then some day, someone is going to make it super easy to build apps on top of the tuner/capture functionality. Maybe they'll write some Python classes to encapsulate it all. (Have you seen what happens when a library gets Python wrappers? The productivity that follows is almost scary!) The point is, it'll leak outside the realm of the chipset and kernel hackers. And when that happens, stand back, because, apps will appear that are as good as Tivo, and even better.
This is one of the few apps where the "open source" dudes really have good odds of beating the commercial guys, because they'll be free to simply make things as good as they can imagine -- whereas Tivo thinks they have to keep a good relationship with the networks. So Tivo deliberatly omits stuff like 30-second skip, makes it inconvenient to archive stuff long-term, occasionally includes some pointless promotion menu item, doesn't integrate well with your network and fileserver(s), etc. There are no corporate pressures in the "longhair linus" camp to hold people back. Free Tivo clones are going to rock!
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Just to be clear, what I'm about to talk about is a PVR, not a DVR, so the signal turns analog and then gets compressed again along the way. So this particular solution may be a little off topic, at first:
.ASF files.
Ever hear of snapstream? (http://www.snapstream.com) If you have a TV Tuner card, this program turns your computer into a Tivo-Like device allowing one to capture TV Shows as
One of the features this software has is it can control your Satellite Dish or Digital Cable via Infa Red. It has a little cable or something connected to an IR emitter so it can set the channel for you. Theoretically, with this device, and IR controlled device could be tuned.
The problem is, as I mentioned above, is that you're going analog and then going digital again with the associated Degredation. (To be fair, I don't think it'd be bad.)
I imagine somebody COULD find a way to do a similar thing with Linux. If they were to take their satellite reciever apart, figure out which cable has the digital data (if that's possible... I'm not claiming to know what really goes on inside of these devices and imagine I'll be told it's not possible), and funnel it off to the computer, it wouldn't be that much bigger of step to add infa-red capability too.
Anybody wanna donate their reciever to experiment on? Heh
"Derp de derp."
It looks like I somehow got you into Tivo-defender mode. I really didn't mean to do that... I'm not saying Tivo sucks, I'm just saying that it's intentionally less than it could be.
[30 sec skip]
Then I lose my skip-to-end button. :( C'mon, if they were really trying to maximize Tivo's ease-of-use, this would be configured somewhere under "my preferences", instead of this select-play-select-9-select silliness. Or better yet, there would have been an extra button on the remote (they were custom-made for Tivo anyway) so that people could do whatever they like best. The Tivo president admitted that this was a consession to the networks.
That ain't nearly as easy to use as "cp". ;-)
I've seen the networking hacks (been too cowardly/lazy to try 'em, though), and I gotta admit that what you did with webserver sounds pretty cool. But that's what they are: hacks. And someday you'll get an update and then you'll have to set things up again. Compare the effort you put into this with what it takes to do the same on a PC.
Well, I guess time will tell. I don't think Tivo has the balls to implement certain ideas, such as
- collaborative suggestions databases. Imagine if the database of all the thumbing up and down you've done over the last couple of years, could be shared, and someone did the "computer dating" game to find other people that like/hate the same stuff as you... You'll learn about TV shows (which you'll probably like) that you otherwise never would have looked at.
- p2p sharing of "sed for video" scripts so that people can share little scripts to automatically playback shows w/out commercials
- Save an hour-long show to CDR in one minute instead of having to play a show in real time for a vcr to record
Someday, some Python programmer is going to think of putting these things into his do-it-yourself PC PVR, and then we'll see who's playing catch-up.As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.