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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.
Unfortunately, in the US, there is no card that works for DirecTV or Dish like that Siemens card. :(
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.
Here's google's cache of the page since it looks slashdotted.
... "Give me a woman who loves beer and I will conquer the w
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
Oh, you mean like this?
http://www.tivo.com/linux/index.html
Why would they have to, they are selling their proprietary software on linux. they might have to release their linux source code, but really, thats not a big deal as that doesnt give away anything important. heres a stock linux kernel with standard software.
Their software and drivers are not GPL. They only make use of other GPL software to run their software.
For screenshots just turn on your TV.
0xB
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.
home theater case
No doubt there are others.
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
It's terrible. This fat tongued posh kid pretending to be cockney.
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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.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't VCRs permit easy sharing of shows?
Yes, so long as you have the magic protocol which can transmit a video tape across fiber.
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?!
This is exactly what I've been looking for for my massive media closet project.
:-)
The idea is to build a tivo-like device for rich people with terrabytes of storage, so you don't have to delete shows when you are done if you don't want to. It would be attached to 200 DVD and 200 CD changers. When the user buys a new CD or DVD, they pop it in the media closet.
Each individual TV would have a dumb terminal machine that connects to the closet server via bluetooth networking. Video would be streamed on demand from the server closet to any one of the remote terminals.
The remote control would be a Palm V, also with bluetooth networking. A unified interface would control access to all media including recorded TV shows, all DVDs and all CDs.
The audio component would be similar to what many people have in their homes currently, with speaker wire running through the walls.
Now, anyone have about $50000 venture capitol for me so I can build the prototype?
std::disclaimer<std::legalese> sig=new std::disclaimer; sig->dump(); delete sig;
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!
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.
***Quis custodiet ipsos custodes***
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.
***Quis custodiet ipsos custodes***
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."
One day, I went to watch one of my DVDs,and it was missing from it's case. I asked the kids if one of them had taken it, and they said no. So I looked around, couldn't find it. Over the next few days, I found various DVDs missing from their cases; wierd ones, too. No pattern. Stuff like the second disc from a two disc set, a Disney movie, Ghost Dog, random discs. Couldn't find them. Then, a few days later, my wife calls me at work, having solved the mystery. She'd come out of the kitchen, and watched my (then) youngest daughter, about a year old, take a DVD out of it's case, put the case back on the rack, toddle over to the computer, and slide the disc into the crack between the top of the DVD-ROM and the computer chassis. Told her to open the chassis and check, and sure enough, there's about five discs crammed into the drive bay. Fortunately, none were damaged.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
Well, if you count a postal employee's uniform as being made of fibers...
Seriously - if you want rare or hard to find stuff, you can get into the taper networks which give stuff away for just the cost of a SASE. If you want easy to find stuff, it's on DVD, which is a few clicks away from Gnutella.
This is not, in reality, a terrifying technology. It may, however, be a semi-killer app for Linux... "Can you do this under Windows? Oh, yeah, well can you write it out to VCD or DVD?"
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien