I've been using VDR for quite a while now, I'm a bit behind on the versions, but having limited linux knowledge I'm sticking to the adage if it ain't broke don't fix it!

Anyway, I'd now like to record an HD channel which is available to me (MPEG2).

I have a single FF card which obviously can display it directly, running in softmode is not really an option as the machine isn't upto decoding the HD stream via software so I've written off the hope of viewing HD for now.

I am still interested in recording the HD streams for play back on a standalone.

The problem I run into is that if I just setup a normal timed recording vdr restarts several times as the FF attempts to display, so the recording is unwatchable. I then had an idea to playback a previous recording whilst recording HD which stops the display of HD but as the recordings suffer a little bit when (I guess) the card is doing to much at once. Finally I came up with the working solution of starting a playback, pausing it and then letting the timer do the rest, this works for the most part and I have been able to get decent recordings.

I don't know if pause has a time out on it either so this may not work for long recordings (I've only done 1 hour at a time so far) and sometimes when a recording starts it stops my playback (I think this may be an issue with my set up)

I was wondering if there was a better way to do this, say to tell VDR that although the HD channel is available I do not wish to "watch" it when a timer starts. There are no other channels on that transponder so I can't tune to a different channel at the same time (And I suspect this would have the same problem as with playback a recording)

I hope I've explained this well!

Any suggestions?

Michael