Tvheadend

Hi,

You should probably have a look at this:
http://code.mythtv.org/trac/attachment/ticket/1704/freebox.readme

It uses vlc as a middle man.

kind regards,
Peter.

Hendrik,

What specifically is it about mythtv's recorder that is missing in TVH?

I know mythtv is meant to have an extremely good recorder, but we're trying to improve things and I've started to put together some of my own ideas and definitely want to take advantage of the better EPG structure we now have. See #1087.

Regards
Adam

Hi,

I actually have the same wish. I've been running a mythtv setup for over 10 years now
(first on dual analog hauppauge PVR500 cards, then on dual hauppauge NOVA T500 cards,
and now a quad tuner TBS6284).
Recently I switched to TVHeadend for one major reason: It's recording backend is far
superior where it concerns DVB, no hassle with the parallel recordings on the same
transponder, fast channelswitching, oscam integration, and it basically just works.

The scheduler however, is far less advanced than mythtv. In mythtv i could program
a series as 'record one episode every day/week on this/any channel (at time xx:xx),
keep maximum 5 recordings, record new and delete old'.
That is very convenient for repeating programs that are scheduled on different or
repeating times. I use this system a lot to record news bulletins, and documentaries
on NGC/Discovery.
Also it seems mythtv is much better able to deal with recognizing duplicate episodes,
thus recording only one, instead of all duplicates (lately, i find myself busy deleting
a lot of duplicate recordings). But perhaps that is just me not having figured out
how to properly configure tvheadend to do the same.

My ideal setup would be to have the mythtv scheduler instruct the tvheadend backend
(instead of using tvheadends own auto-scheduler), and still use XBMC frontend for playback,
which seems a lot more modern compared to mythtv frontend.

I don't have a lot of spare time to work on this, but i've been looking at extending
at least the tvheadend recording ui, so that it can at least store some additional
user input, so that i can have a python script do a bit of post processing every night
to auto delete obsolete recordings, that could be a start.

Regards,
Mark.

Hi all,

Thank you very much for responding to my post. Thank you Mark for explaining the scheduler so well. This would have been my first point to explain why I (still) see MythTV as the better recorder. IMHO there is a second import point (at least for me): The Editor. MythTV provides in its frontend a recording editor to cut comercial and/or the surplus recording at the beginning and the end. However one weakness of MythTV (I'm still using 0.24) is that it cannot export well the recordings (with respect to the cut marks) into a new "raw" TS stream, especially when it comes to HD recordings (I know that there are export methods but for example they dont't work with HD or export only one audio track (and if it was 5.1 it will be mixed down to stereo) and drop any subtitles). Therefore I have written an little dirty script that uses dd to do the job. I transfer then the files to a faster machine and convert them to mkv with Handbrake (and sometimes using ProjectX to extract the Subtitles).

I know that implementing a cut editor to tvheadend is more complicated since the frontends are different project (e.g. I use XBMC).

Knowing that implementing all this would be much, I had the initial idea four month ago. I looked into both sources and gave up in frustration since MythTV and tvheadend implements disjunct parts of "IPTV". I sas already a solution with VLC like in Peters link, and give it a try when I find the time. However I would need still to extract the EPG from tvheadend and feed it into mythtv - AFAIK tvheadend supports no xmltv output up to date (ok, I'm still running 2.99 ...).

My personal workaround is currently (having a twin tuner): one tuner for Myth to do the recordings of my favorite shows and one tuner to watch live TV with XBMC as a front to tvheadend.

Regards,
Hendrik

Hey guys,

I'll try and respond as best I can, but you guys have got way more experience that I by the sounds of it

Hendrik: with regard to commercial cutting etc.. at the moment I don't see that happening. Or at least I don't see it happening in TVH core, its more of a post recording processing script. Not saying it couldn't be in the core, I just don't think its going to be near the top of anyones (by that I mean available devs) TODO list.

BUT if you have any useful ideas on how it might work, or whether it should be part of the core etc... then please do let us know.

Mark: I think as you alluded, much of that is already available. However there are a couple of points that aren't. For example specifying the retention policy is not possible and isn't something I've considered too much, so I'll take that on board.

with respect to duplicates I've tried to improve this a bit, but I'm not going to go down the direction that some of the myth code takes. It's fraught with problems for little gain (I say little not because it doesn't produce a reasonable result, but because most TVH users don't mind the occasional false positive and TVH is aiming to be light weight both in terms of ease of use, deps and processing etc...). However I have tried improving things by using hashes of the description for duplicate detection. This will typically work well over short term periods where single source EPG info is used.

Also more and more upstream providers are offering better EPG data. In the UK we have Atlas, which has proper unique IDs for episodes. There is the CRID system in EIT (I know its used by Freesat/Freeview in the UK as well as others around the world). And XMLTV has the dd_progid system used by schedules direct. All of which TVH now supports.

So I can definitely say making duplicate detect better is a key element of what I'm doing, but only where it doesn't require lots of horrible fixups and desc fuzzy matching etc...

I also do want to improve the DVR code to take advantage of these things and to offer better configuration. So please feel free to make any suggestions on #1087.

We do want to improve TVH as much as possible, however there are limits to what 3 people can achieve and we also have to be mindful of what TVH is (and its most definitely not MythTV )

Adam

There are a few issues with the vlc option.
With my setup at least 3 different versions of mythtv (0.21, 0.24 and 0.26) crash (or have other strange issues) with the freebox setup.
Also, I really want teletext (e.g. for subtitles), but by streaming it in the vlc way I only get a video and an audio stream.
I think it's filtered out this way by tvheadend, but I also get "disabled no valid input" messages on the TELETEXT stream from tvheadend, so this might be a whole different issue.

Also, it says in mythtv ticket number 9670 that rtsp support won't be fixed because the live555 code has been removed from the master branch, so I think I'm back to square 1.

this be really cool. If only tvheaded could create some kind of virtual dvb device (just like the dvbloopback device does). Then you could use mythtv and tvheadend next to each other.