Re: Digital video recording software
On Wed, Dec 25, 2002 at 03:46:00PM +0100, Richard Atterer wrote:
> What I'd like to do with my machine:
>
> - record full-resolution TV. Possible with "streamer" (without dropped
> frames if you do it right!), except that rgb15 format eats 1.3 GB per
> minute. There's a nice fast GPLd lossless compression codec called
> "huffyuv", but apparently there's no way to use it for encoding under
> Linux. Hopefully mencoder will be able to use it at some point.
keep in mind that huffyuv only gets about 2:1 or so compression:
http://math.berkeley.edu/~benrg/huffyuv.html#Benchmarks
so the output is still huge. There is some support in ffmpeg CVS for
huffyuv now, I believe, but it is really not usable for everyday recording,
only for situations where a short-term lossless copy is desirable (and will
fit in available storage).
> - Watch TV while recording. Apparently, this is impossible at full
> resolution because the PCI bus is too slow to transmit the data twice,
> but just a small preview window would be enough. I haven't found any
> app which can do that, though...
Eh? I do this all the time with MythTV; PCI is not usually the bottleneck,
but CPU and main memory bandwidth, and these requirements can be reduced in
exchange for lower quality.
> - Cut out the commercials, remove black borders, deinterlace.
> avidemux looks OK for that, except I think it can't read huffyuv.
You can do some basic manual editing in MythTV (cutting out segments). For
more complex tasks, you'll want to use a more featureful editing program
like avidemux.
> - Encode to fit 700MB, or 2x700MB in two separate files. Possible with
> avidemux.
>
> Everything gets much easier if you only record at half of the TV
> resolution, for example you can watch while recording, or use a more
> processor-intensive encoder.
What you want is MythTV: www.mythtv.org
Here's a blurb from the package description:
MythTV implements the following PVR features, and more, with a
unified graphical interface:
.
- Basic 'live-tv' functionality. Pause/Fast Forward/Rewind "live" TV.
- Video compression using RTjpeg or MPEG-4
- Program listing retrieval using XMLTV
- Themable, semi-transparent on-screen display
- Electronic program guide
- Scheduled recording of TV programs
- Resolution of conflicts between scheduled recordings
- Basic video editing
It's licensed under the GPL; feel free to subscribe to the mailing list and
get involved.
--
- mdz
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