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Is there a daemon style program for scheduled DVB recording?

linux-dvb Adam Nielsen 3 participants 6 messages Feb 23, 2008 – Mar 1, 2008 Media (V4L/DVB)

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Hi everyone,

I'm currently setting up a new server that will (among other things) record TV shows for me. In the past I've used cron to schedule recording jobs, and I've used dvbrecord to do the actual recording.

This set up has served me well for many years, but unfortunately dvbrecord doesn't seem to exist any more, and it never supported programs with AC3 audio anyway (which is pretty much all the HDTV channels here in Australia.)

If you were setting up a headless machine to record TV shows, what programs would you use to do this? Ideally I'd like the shows dumped into a local directory, so that I can watch them over NFS with mplayer, but I'm open to alternatives.

I really want to avoid running a whole "media centre" program like MythTV, VDR, etc. as I'd like this to be lean and clean and I don't mind using the command line for playback.

Any suggestions? I'd be happy to document the final system, installation, configuration, etc. on the LinuxTV wiki, as I couldn't find any info about this sort of thing on there at the moment.

Many thanks,
Adam.

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#1 lore raw

Il Saturday 23 February 2008 09:14:44 Adam Nielsen ha scritto:

Quoted 20 lines

Hi everyone,

I'm currently setting up a new server that will (among other things) record TV shows for me. In the past I've used cron to schedule recording jobs, and I've used dvbrecord to do the actual recording.

This set up has served me well for many years, but unfortunately dvbrecord doesn't seem to exist any more, and it never supported programs with AC3 audio anyway (which is pretty much all the HDTV channels here in Australia.)

If you were setting up a headless machine to record TV shows, what programs would you use to do this? Ideally I'd like the shows dumped into a local directory, so that I can watch them over NFS with mplayer, but I'm open to alternatives.

I really want to avoid running a whole "media centre" program like MythTV, VDR, etc. as I'd like this to be lean and clean and I don't mind using the command line for playback.

Quoted 7 lines

Any suggestions? I'd be happy to document the final system, installation, configuration, etc. on the LinuxTV wiki, as I couldn't find any info about this sort of thing on there at the moment.

Many thanks,
Adam.

there used to be dvbd somewhere sometimes, although I can't say how it works because I never used it

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Quoted 2 lines

there used to be dvbd somewhere sometimes, although I can't say how it works because I never used it

I did investigate dvbd a few years ago, it seems great and does exactly what I want but unfortunately I could never get it to work with my card.
I looked into it again this afternoon but unfortunately I think the
project is dead, it hasn't been updated since 2004 and only a few files in CVS were updated around 2006.

Cheers,
Adam.

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#3 lore raw
In reply to Adam Nielsen
Quoted 10 lines · Adam Nielsen

If you were setting up a headless machine to record TV shows, what programs would you use to do this? Ideally I'd like the shows dumped into a local directory, so that I can watch them over NFS with mplayer,
but I'm open to alternatives.

I really want to avoid running a whole "media centre" program like MythTV, VDR, etc. as I'd like this to be lean and clean and I don't mind
using the command line for playback.

Obviously, you seem to have never actually tried VDR. It's extremely lean and clean and it don't need to run with any output. You can telnet into it and schedule recordings and it's easy to view recordings over NFS, or use a streaming media client directly towards VDR with a suitable streaming plugin.

Signature · 10 lines
Torgeir Veimo
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#4 lore raw
Quoted 5 lines

Obviously, you seem to have never actually tried VDR. It's extremely lean and clean and it don't need to run with any output. You can telnet into it and schedule recordings and it's easy to view recordings over NFS, or use a streaming media client directly towards VDR with a suitable streaming plugin.

Oh ok, I did try VDR a few years back but with a different focus (TV output) and it seemed quite buggy at the time. I didn't realise it could operate solely as a daemon - I'll have to have another look now - thanks!

Cheers,
Adam.

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#5 lore raw

Hi again,

Thanks for all the replies! I've checked out a few programs and decided to use dvbstream as Tim Hewett suggested.

Quoted 5 lines
Quoted 5 lines

Obviously, you seem to have never actually tried VDR. It's extremely lean and clean and it don't need to run with any output. You can telnet into it and schedule recordings and it's easy to view recordings over NFS, or use a streaming media client directly towards VDR with a suitable streaming plugin.

I installed VDR after reading your message but that's about as far as I got. I couldn't work out how to do a scan to pick up all the channels, and I may have been willing to create a channel config file manually except that there were a number of other issues. For a start, the telnet syntax was rather cumbersome - crontabs may be just as bad but at least you can copy and paste :-)

Also I couldn't see where you control the name of the files that VDR outputs - I want a single file for each show (>4GB if need be) with the name of the show and the time it was recorded, but I don't think VDR can do that.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining about VDR, I just think that it's not suitable for the very specific purpose I'm after.

I do appreciate the suggestion though!

Quoted 4 lines

Tim Hewett wrote:
I just use dvbstream, scheduled using cron. To work with that I wrote
a utility to work out which is the next schedule in the crontab and
set the hardware alarm clock time to have the computer boot a few

Quoted 8 lines

minutes in advance of the recording time, run it just before shutting
down (it shuts it down for you) and the PC then wakes at the right
time. I also modified dvbstream to allow the DVB device name to be used instead of its adaptor number, to cater for the devices changing numbers between bootups. Some initial changes were made to dvbstream to specify a programme name to be monitored in the now/next programme info, to try to cater for early programme starts or overruns, but I can't say that it is reliable as it hasn't been used much.

Wow, that seems quite elaborate! Luckily my set up is a server that runs 24/7 anyway, so I don't need to worry about any power scheduling. Plus here in Australia most of our TV stations don't run to the times listed in the now/next info anyway (to influence ratings or some such) so I have to resort to the low-tech method of starting early and finishing late.

I've experimented with dvbstream and now that it can work with Program IDs instead of bare PIDs I think it will do the job nicely.

Again, thanks for the suggestions!

Cheers,
Adam.

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