Re: [Openpvr-devel] On-going development; ideas, etc.

[Dave C. <de...@co...>]

Greetings,  I'm a lurker on this list but since some discussion has 
popped up I thought I'd chime in as well.  While I agree with a lot of 
the long-term vision stuff, I'm just trying to get basic functionality 
first :-)  For example, so far my hopes are pinned on the following 
components:


Capture hardware: Pinnacle Studio Pro PCI (bttv driver)

Capture software: NuppleVideo (not the best compression, but the a/v 
sync is good, unlike others I've messed with so far)

Listings grabbings: XMLTV's tv_grab_na

Show selection & record scheduling: XMLTV's tv_grep, bash, and cron 
today, but I have hopes that cheematv's code will be available for this

Playback software: mplayer (this deals with FF and RW, but I honestly 
don't need "pause live TV" in the base functionality.)  So far, I'm 
having strange colorspace mismatches between nuvrec and mplayer, however...

Playback hardware: a "book PC" i810-based system with TV-out (a 
play-only system that will live in my entertainment center, while the 
recording server lives in the basement... I didn't really want 
client-server, but the Book PC has no PCI slots and thus can't record!!)

Playback selection via TV interface: unknown at this point; maybe a 
browser-based thing using really big fonts on top of X (with no real 
window management to speak of, just one app that takes over the whole X 
"dekstop")  The "VDR" project has a cool front end, but I haven't looked 
at extracting it from the DVB-based capture software it's built for.

Remote control: LIRC with the remote that came with my Pinnacle card.


All of that is required to just get me the basic functionality to 
emulate a VCR (record only what I specifically tell it to, and then let 
me view it again later).  Later on, obviously, there are plenty of other 
things to add (many of which have been mentioned) such as "burn this 
show to a VCD," "keep track of show episodes that I've seen and record 
unseen ones even if I didn't tell you to," etc.

I have a feeling that disk space management is going to have to play a 
major role in the ultimate user interface to this project; not just so a 
user can always know whether there is enough room on the hard drive to 
store the show they just asked to record, but especially once the system 
starts recording shows on it's own.  Exlicitly user-specified recordings 
are going to have to be of a higher priority (in terms of getting access 
to the remaining disk space) than speculative recording that the system 
does on it's own (you sure don't want to miss your "regular" shows 
because FX decided to run a two-day marathon of X-Files and filled your 
hard drive).  And maybe the "shows I think you might like" kind of 
speculative recording needs to be at an even lower priority.  Assuming 
that different recording qualities work without sacrificing a/v sync 
(which naturally implies different disk space requirements), maybe the 
more speculative recording could be done at a lower 
quality/disk-requirement setting to help minimize the loss of space for 
explicit user-specified recording.  (Obviously, being able to burn shows 
to VCD plays a role in disk space management as well, since it gets them 
off the hard drive without losing them forever.  Being able to do this 
may require some amount of scratch space to be set aside however, so 
you're never in a position that the hard disk is too full for the system 
to build a CD image to burn, so therefore you can't free up disk space 
without losing data.)

In any case, I'd be happy at this point if I could just get a system to 
regularly download listings and always record my short list of specific 
shows in specific timeslots regardless of whether my kids watched a VHS 
tape that day and everyone forgot to press "timer rec" when they were 
done. :-)

PS - I really like the idea of having a distributed farm of PVR 
devices... if my PVR is busy recording at a specific time and I need to 
record two shows at the same time, It would be fantastic to borrow time 
on my neighbor's PVR to record my show if his is free during that 
timeslot.  (Naturally, I'd be happy to share mine with him as well under 
the same circumstances.)  Would that technically be illegal, though? 
While I know it happens all the time, is loaning your VHS recording of a 
TV show to a friend because he forgot to record it himself (probably 
because HIS kids watched a tape and forgot to set the VCR back up to 
record) actually technically illegal?

Some other "far future" things I'd like to do are more inline with 
Internet-on-TV types of functions.  For example, weather-on-demand 
(rather than waiting for The Weather Channel to get around to showing me 
my forcast) and local movie schedules on demand (with trailers of 
course).  I don't really want to browse the Internet in general from my 
TV, but those two "data lookup" applications seem to be a good fit for 
TV display.

- Dave