watching tv in linux
 

Anyone have any idea if the proggies out there for
watching TV in liux will allow you to set a timer and record.

Reason being I'm buying the ATI TV Wonder add on card and
I know it works for watching TV but no idea if I'll be able to
setup a time and have it record my fav shows.

Thanks for your input.

-Muddy

i use mp1e for recording tv programs, which i think is acutally also buried inside Zapping, which i don't like. There's also other programs like vcr or dvr which can record to divx and a few other formats. i've not found a system that i actually like tho. MPlayer has a superb recording engine, but can only capture video from tv cards at the moment, not sound, bugger. have a look at those programs, i'm not aware of a decent all in one program, and as for a timer recording, well i don't think there's anything that can start at a given time. i'd suggest using a cronjob to start recording. most capture programs (oh there's also nuvrec and FFMPEGrec too) can stop recording fine after 30mins or whatever.

well I guess I've settled in with XawTv as my tv viewer and VCR as my recording software, however after 2 days of fighting trying to get VCR to install I finally (with my buddy's help) got it installed.
Now if I can only get it to work, hmpf...

hehe, yeah XaWtv does an excellent job in as a TV viewer, it's good and smooth.
on the VCR thing, good luck.
How is that TV card working?, did RH have a hrd time getting it to work?, or was the driver in the kernel already?.
I have the Hauppauge Tv card, and it works very nicely, the driver comes in the kernel as well.

i've been using mencoder to record direct to divx from a tuner card, works absolutely perfectly, much much MUCH better than vcr / mp1e etc...

yeah?, and in what format does it record the Tv signal?, is it mpeg?, that sounds really cool, :)

well.. divx like i said, or dump to mpeg or rgb if you're a sadist... heh, or even animated gifs....

ah, gotcha. hehe, I wonder if I can connect a video camera to the tv tuner and make an animated gif of me jumping up and down, hehehe, that would be really funny, :D
yeah, it's kindda not cool that mplayer only supports video and not sound yet on the recording. next version may have that support however, :)

why do you think it doesn't support sound?? :confused:

because you said so bro, :(

yeah... in june....

I am currently playing with MythTV which turns your PC into a Personal Video Recorder. Works pretty good. Have been using it for a couple of days. Excellent documentation if you have LInux mandrake 9. Redhat 8 has some problems but there are workarounds. MythTV allows you to watch TV on your PC with time shifting functions (accomplished by mythtv encoding the current channel selection in realtime). You have an electronic program guide via xmltv which you can schedule to update everyday so you have current tv listings for your area. It can use the Electronic Program Guide to set recordings of your favorite TV shows. It also has a menu for displaying the recorded programs with a small preview video window and you can delete recorded video and fix recording conflicts. You must have XawTV or any other TV software working first as mythtv copies from the /dev/video0 device. I am using this on a 1 ghz PC with ATI TV Wonder PCI and Nvidia Geforce3Ti200 with TV out running Linux Mandrake 9. I edited the XF86Config-4 file and made a copy for setting TV output or Monitor output which i can switch with a simple script and pressing CTrl ALT Backspace. Quality is ok as my machine is not really high end I have to make compromises. I used the MPEG4 codec at 400 x 240 resolution and 1800 data rate and results are vhs quality. ON a high end machine you can probably do 640x480 resolution. It allows you to choose between rtjpeg and mpeg4. Program development is ongoing at a very good pace. Hope this helps.

thanks for the input, I downloaded Mythtv but had not yet looked at it. I will tonight.

I will second what cmisip has said.

About a week ago I got mythtv installed and I couldn't be happier. Now I never miss programs I want to see as I jsut schedule them. Pausing and reqinding TV works great as well. I also setup MythWeb so that from anywhere I can hit my webserver, check out my guide and choose to record or not record any program I want :)

I really can't say enough about MythTV. It is a very polished program, that does a great job at what it claims to. I encourage everyone to try it out who is looking for such a program.

Mythtv is an excellent program. You might get hooked. I upgraded my PC to an AMD2400 xp with a Soyo kt400 platinum ultra with dual TV tuners and dual sound devices (onboard and SB LIve). Strung together three drives via LVM for a total of 260 gigs of ext3 video storage. Installed a homepna card and bridged it with onboard 10/100 so I can run mythtv across a 10 mbps phoneline network. Installed a hollywood plus card for xine audio output. Nvidia card with TV out. Creative infra remote. Turned it into a firwalled ipmasq server. Machine runs 24/7 with no problems. Now I can record two shows at the same time while watching a recording in mythtv while xine plays back an mpeg file on a separate windowmaker workspace, while surfing the internet on my laptop, while another pc is accessing this machine through phoneline and playing back another video file (i am working on some latency issues with homepna at this time which might go away if I decrease the data rate). But how is this for an ultimate pvr setup. The program still has bugs and I am waiting for the .8 release but it is definitely very usable. XMLTV introduced some errors in the electronic program guide but that should soon be fixed. I've gone overboard but its so much fun.