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Re: [LUG] Pruning discovery!!

 

Simon Avery wrote:

> I use a DVR on my windows pc which has two freeview tuners and that 
> works very well and has an impressively wide range of channels with no 
> encryption or card/cam required - worth doing if you want to record a 
> series of a program in one click, and watch back on a laptop or tv out 
> at your leisure. Sadly when I researched DVR's, I had a lot of problems 
> finding reliable and well featured software that supported my cards for 
> linux. Windows at the time had several good free options so I had to go 
> that route. Shame and I hope it's changed now.

MythTV is pretty good in that respect now, to the point where we rarely
watch television any other way (I don't even have a freeview-capable
aerial or STB connected to the main television).  I have a CentOS5
backend with two twin-tuner DVB-T cards in, with a diskless front-end
for the kids running minimyth and a soon-to-be-diskless front-end for
"the grown-ups" based on my own CentOS5 install/build.  I also run a
windowed front-end on my desktop PC so I can listen to radio programmes
whilst working.  Generally I schedule recordings using the web
interface because it's faster than using a remote control.

There are still a few niggles -- the music plugin is a bit ropey,
exporting to stand-alone video formats doesn't always work sanely where
the recorded channel has aspect ratio changes, and some of the USB-based
tuners have occasional problems (mostly that's a v4l problem rather
than mythtv), but generally "it just works".

Slated for the next major release is a "virtual tuner" system that
allows recordings of different channels on the same DVB-T mux to be
made at the same time using only one tuner.  I look forward to all
my potential recording clashes disappearing when that happens.

All that said, it's still a relatively complex bit of software to get
installed and working, so probably not for the faint of heart.  The
users mailing list is also fairly heavy traffic -- up to several hundred
posts a day.

James

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