[vdr] Re: Beginner questions

[Jörg Knitter <joerg.knitter@gmx.de>]

> Michael Kaye wrote:
>
> I live in the UK and my aim is to receive the FreeView channels,
through
> my upgraded terrestrial aerial. I would also like to be able to record
> more than one channel at once. I would like to stream through the
signal
> through the card to my television, using the best connection possible
> (scart?).
> Is it possible to do these things in a stable fashion?

I only use the Sat, not the terrestrial version of the Hauppauge DVB
cards, but recording more than one channel should also be possible with
the terrestrial version. If you only use one card, you can only do
multiple records if the channels use the same transponder (frequency).
If you have more cards (e.g. again a full featured one or a Hauppauge
Nova - but this might not be available for terrestrial broadcasts), you
can also record channels from different transponders.
The card is being connected using FBAS out. If you also want S-Video
out, you have to get a card with hardware revision 1.3 (maybe also 1.6),
but not the new 2.x cards, because they don´t have the famous J2 jumper
that offers S-Video out. This is for DVB-s cards, don´t know about the
DVB-t cards.

> What dvb cards are recommended for these purposes?

Hauppauge WinTV-DVB-t, maybe there is also a terrestrial version from
Siemens that uses the same chipset.

> Are usb versions supported? Is the usb connection really fast enough?
Is
> there an improvement to the signal to the tv by removing the unit from
the
> interference of the computer (by using a usb unit)?

No, USB versions are still not supported by the driver.

> How feasible is it to use the computer for other purposes, while
> streaming/recording the data? (AMD Duron 850MHz, 128MB RAM)

The stream is decoded by an on-board-MPEG-2 decoder chip, so I don´t
have any bigger performance losses when watching TV. Concerning
recording, it depends IMHO on your system configuration and the cache
management of VDR. If you work on the same partition where you record
your movies there might be dropped frames. But I use a different
partition for my videos so I can´t tell you exactly if working on the
machine while recording does not have any effect. In the past, there
were some buffer overflows with certain drivers even when not doing
anything on the system, so the development concerning recordings is
still going on...

> Is it feasible to stream directly to a dvd rewriter?

No. Additionally, you write the stream with the data rate sent by the
broadcast station (without any conversion), so only 2-3 hours will fit
on a DVD+/-RW. That´s why I would still prefer using a HD even if direct
writing to a DVD would be possible. Additionally, I believe that there
are even no PacketWriting drivers for CD-RW burners for Linux.

Hope this gives you rough overview. Maybe other users on this list can
be more precise and comment on some vague points.

With kind regards

Jörg Knitter



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