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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. :(
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
For screenshots just turn on your TV.
0xB
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
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.
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?!
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***
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.
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.