Re: a different kind of video recorder?

[Guido Fiala <gfiala@s.netic.de>]

One thing at first: 
Carsten, i wonder why are you sending those mails only "CC"
linux-dvb and in parallel "TO" special persons?

>> 
>> What is if you want to use the DVB card directly within your desktop computer,
>> not like Klaus Schmidingers's extra box?
>> 
>> I thought about a program with just the features of Klaus' one, but not using
>> the on-screen-display - using X-dialogs and displaying the video as overlay just
>> like gVideo does.
>
>It should not be too hard to extend Klaus' Program
>to be able to display the video in an X window.

Of course that would be great, the major problem in the first instance would be
displaying the OSD in the overlay, AFAIK it's only shown at the AV-out? 

>
>
>> For recording i thought of using the "at" and "cron" daemons, think we do not
>> need to invent the wheel again ;-)
>
>Of course this is easily possible right now, but you 
>would gain very little by it. Klaus' vdr program has a
>smaller CPU usage than the cron daemon.

That's true, but if you consider running OSM displaying an X-Window, the
application is closed on X shutdown. Think it would be better to have a
record-daemon part running frow console or init - then we are close to cron and
at, running anyway on most computers - so now additional process load.
(BTW, is not nearly measurable at my system ;-)
Another advantage is, that you can not accidently close/hang the recording
process.

>> BTW, does the Siemens card support simultanous record/playback for different
>> sources - e.g. recording one program while viewing a pre-recorded file?
>
>AFAIK, the card kind-of-supports it (DMA can only go 
>one way at a time), but the current driver does not.

Not to bad, a normal video recorder can't do it anyway. At least with Xv-support
in X11, we could still display MPEG2 in software decoding at the same time.

>> I have probably not the time and experience to write such a program all on my
>> own, but i would like to help programing if someone or more would participate...
>
>Give Klaus' software a try.
>The more I use it, the more I like it.
>As I said earlier in another threat: it would make a lot 
>more sense  to work together improving Klaus' video 
>recorder rather than starting another one.

Basically i agree, it's already quite advanced - restarting from scratch would
take much more time.

As we talk about improvements:
-think it needs better keyboard support - it just takes to much time to jump
from one channel to another or to type in a file name
-all of the features of xawtv, which is like i think the best one floating
around so far! (Thanks, Gerd ;-)
-as i said, i want to archive videos on streamer (not while recording, but
i think it would go - despite windows crashes if i try it there ;-) - for ease
of use it would be nice to have only one file per recording (i'am waiting for
64bit-ReiserFS) and be able to select it in a kind of file-browser, the frame
index, if required, should be build on the fly.

Guido