[vdr] Re: Feature Request: All-Time-Recording

[Tobias Haustein <haustein@aixmail.de>]

* Dirk Melchers (melchers@nureg.de) [030414 17:50]:

> > - Increased wear on the HDD. Whilist the disk is spinning 
> >   all the time, your idea would mean the HDD is working all
> >   the time VDR is running. Cutting a movie would become
> [...]
> 
> OK. Right.

This should only be a problem for old machines. Current machines are already
powerful enough and the machines vdr will run on in two years won't bother
at all... And you can always use a second hard disk.

> > What *I* never understood about this idea (you aren't
> > the first to mention it ;o)) is *what is it good for*????
> > Why do people want to buffer their stream to RAM or
> > HDD. Just for fear that you might miss out on 2 minutes
> > of the movie? 
> 
> Maybe you watch something and after 30 minutes you decide, that it would 
> be worth to save the program for viewing it again or show to your 
> friends/family... So you could say: save this from 20:15 to 21:00 to "My 
> Friend on TV" directory.

That's one thing. The other is that there are people (like me) who do not
_plan_ watching TV. I'd like to just switch the TV on and look what movies
are currently playing. If there is an interesting movie, I'd like to watch
it from the beginning. This is absolutely possible with vdr by using some
skripts, but it would be nicer if such a feature would be available in vdr.

Since vdr can record lots of channels simultaneously (at least the german
channels are mostly FTA), one can record all channels where one expects
movies. I've already tried to record 7 channels in parallel without problems.
The harddisk consumption is neglectable, because recording 5 hours (20:00
till 1:00) on say 4 channels fills about 30 GB of harddisk space. So, it
would even be possible to hook an old hard drive only for this purpose to
the second IDE port.

But there is another similar feature which is in my opinion worth looking at. 
I understand that switching a channel takes so long because vdr has to find
the next I-Frame before starting to play. An I-Frame occurs about twice a
second, therefore one only needs a ring buffer that holds about one second
of stream data in order to allow zapping without any delay. The result of
course would be that you wouldn't watch the live stream, but a stream with a
delay of 1/4 second on average. That is no problem except during the soccer 
world championship ;-)


Ciao,

Tobias

-- 
Tobias Haustein

E-Mail tobias.haustein@aixmail.de


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