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PVR For Linux

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the now-that's-impressive dept.

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.

2 of 297 comments (clear)

  1. Re:bye bye tivo by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Troll

    Ahh, the Open Source world.

    • Company comes up with cool, innovative service, even to the point of letting people fuck around with thier hardware (within limits), and still manages to survive when most other tech companies collapsed.
    • Open Source advocates come along, and look at the idea, get pissed of they actually have to pay for something, and clone it.
    • Company hangs on for a while, but eventually finds that there's no point in trying to make people pay for a service they can get for free.
    • Company, facing the inevitable, flings lawsuits at people while trying to stop itself from imploding.
    • Company is maligned as evil for hitting people with it's death throes, while they blissfully ignore what killed it.


    Why is anyone going to come up with new ideas in this kind of environment? When anything they do will be cloned by people too cheap to shell out $9.95 a month for thier service, resulting in thier death?

  2. Re:bye bye tivo by LoadStar · · Score: 0, Troll

    There may or may not be DMCA implications - but there sure as heck are patent violations. Pause Technologies, Gemstar/TV Guide, TiVo, and ReplayTV all have a few patents that this product is violating.

    Will any of the above go after this project? Probably not, as they're currently busy squabbling amongst themselves - but it's possible. I hope the people running this project have hired really good lawyers - they may need them.