Restart/Catch-Up TV

[totallymaxed]

oh?! I thought the whole advantage was the VDR would/could record all channels in the same MUX so that you only needed a small number of tuners to be able to capture all the TV channels in the UK because so many are on the same mux?

Let me explain how MUX's work again...

A MUX (a Multiplex od channels) is transmitted on a specific Radio frequency ie channel 31 for example. This MUX can contain a mix of TV & Radio 'channels' - these 'channels' are digital streams encoded inside the MUX and they can be extracted individually by the Linux DVB API and passed to vdr. How many TV/Radio channels are contained inside the MUX is determined by the amount of bandwidth allocated to each by the broadcaster.

So with the above in mind you can see that a single DVB-T tuner can be tuned to the given frequency for a particular MUX, in our example above Channel 31, and once tuned can then deliver any of the channels encoded inside that MUX to vdr simultaneously... this uses only a single tuner. Additional MUX's can also be made available by tuning additional tuners to the radio frequencies they are transmitted on... and again with these MUX's any encoded channel can be made available using a single tuner per MUX.

Hopefully that makes sense now.

All the best

Andrew

[tricky_dicky]

This sounds like a great idea and like Andrew said it shouldn't be too difficult.

I was just thinking though, in the UK we have lots of repeats, so Top Gear which is originally shown on a Sunday night on BBC2 is broadcast again 3 times in the same week at different times on different BBC channels, so why record them all? Would there be a way of recording it once on the Sunday night and then linking that back to the EPG so when it is broadcast again a separate recording isn't made but just a pointer back to the original recording thus saving a huge amount of disc space.  The end user will not know where the recording is actually stored, they will just play the file they want.

I think this could come in very handy with HD where space does start to become a bit more limiting. 

Rich

[totallymaxed]

This sounds like a great idea and like Andrew said it shouldn't be too difficult.

I was just thinking though, in the UK we have lots of repeats, so Top Gear which is originally shown on a Sunday night on BBC2 is broadcast again 3 times in the same week at different times on different BBC channels, so why record them all? Would there be a way of recording it once on the Sunday night and then linking that back to the EPG so when it is broadcast again a separate recording isn't made but just a pointer back to the original recording thus saving a huge amount of disc space.  The end user will not know where the recording is actually stored, they will just play the file they want.

I think this could come in very handy with HD where space does start to become a bit more limiting. 

Rich

Yes that probably could be done... but in my view it would have to be done so that from the users point of view even the repeats were recorded...in fact those EPG entries would just point to the original recording. With disk space being so inexpensive I am not sure in reality that recording everything is really much of an issue however.

Andrew

[chrisbirkinshaw]

Yes that probably could be done... but in my view it would have to be done so that from the users point of view even the repeats were recorded...in fact those EPG entries would just point to the original recording. With disk space being so inexpensive I am not sure in reality that recording everything is really much of an issue however.

I think in this case development effort < expense of storage!

[chrisbirkinshaw]

I think it would be good to be able to configure which mux to constantly record. For example in the UK I would only want mux 1 (BBC) and mux 2 (D3D4) as the rest is garbage! ;-)

Andrew - What dual tuner PCI cards have you tested for DVB-T?

Thanks,

Chris

[totallymaxed]

I think it would be good to be able to configure which mux to constantly record. For example in the UK I would only want mux 1 (BBC) and mux 2 (D3D4) as the rest is garbage! ;-)

Andrew - What dual tuner PCI cards have you tested for DVB-T?

Thanks,

Chris

An option to exclude a MUX (or possibly more usefully a channel) from continuous recording would be good I agree.

 DVB-T Dual tuner cards tested;

- Nova-T500 ***still unstable and seem to cause many instability issues for the USB bus.
- Divico FusionHDTV Dual Digital 4 ***Looking good for 0810

We have also tested the following USB stick dual tuner card;

- KWorld PlusTV Dual DVB-T Stick 399U (Model No. KW-DVB-T 399U)

Andrew

[colinjones]

Andrew, did you guys ever decide whether it was worth testing/integrating HDHomeRun (realise that the HD part isn't of much interest to you yet)

[Crawtech]

Hi All
Andrew I have been using the Nova-t500-dvbt in 810 for over two weeks and its as solid as a rock now not like it was in 710

Colin I have two HDHomeRun's and will be testing with 810 this week
 

[colinjones]

Hi All
Andrew I have been using the Nova-t500-dvbt in 810 for over two weeks and its as solid as a rock now not like it was in 710

Colin I have two HDHomeRun's and will be testing with 810 this week
 

That's good to hear on the Nova, I have one in my 0710 core, and although I never use it as I never got to the bottom of the slightly jerky video issue, it was working fine and I never had the USB issues ..... until about a month ago.... then it started filling my logs with errors that I can only assume relate to that issue. Would be nice if this got better in 0810 (nice if the jerkiness went away, too, so I could actually use it!)

As for the HDHomeRun DVB, it is certainly compatible with Linux, and the company supports that. I guess my question is more about getting the out-of-the-box pnp that the ATSC version has...

[Crawtech]

Hi Colin

The Nova T-500 work fantastic in 810 no faults at all
the HDHomeRun gets detected by linuxmce fine even in 710 but the problem is myth does not now what to do with the dvb-t format from what I have read there is a patch for myth 021 wich will fix the problem and then we can make it fully plug and play in LMCE 810


Chris
 

[colinjones]

ihas - I'm more interested in VDR compatibility, have you tried that?

[Crawtech]

Colin
No not at all never used VDR full stop

[posde]

colinjones,

there is no support for the HD Homerun in VDR that I know of.

[totallymaxed]

Andrew, did you guys ever decide whether it was worth testing/integrating HDHomeRun (realise that the HD part isn't of much interest to you yet)

We have not done any active work on the HDHomeRun yet as we have been focussing more on DVB-S (Freesat here in the UK) and twin tuner usb & PCI support.

SiliconDust have an OSS lib for intergrating the HDHomeRun though http://www.silicondust.com/downloads/linux so integration looks possible... but it wont work out of the 'box' with vdr.

Andrew

[totallymaxed]

Hi All
Andrew I have been using the Nova-t500-dvbt in 810 for over two weeks and its as solid as a rock now not like it was in 710

Colin I have two HDHomeRun's and will be testing with 810 this week
 

Thats sounds promising...however we've seen many weeks of stability with the T500/0710 combination... then suddenly it goes unstable with i2c and other usb related errors. Lets with 0810 we get this usb issue with the T500 licked for good! We will put a few T500's in our next 0810 test core and give some feedback here...

Andrew