pyromanfo@users.sourceforge.net Plenty of Hard drive space
Enough processor and ram for your Video Recorder
Character Devices -> Real-Time Clock support - Make sure this is enabled, because an accurate clock is crucial to synchronizing your system with your cable/satellite provider.
Character Devices -> I2C Support -> I2C bit-banging Interfaces - This is required by the TV Card driver
ATA/IDE/MFM/RLL support -> IDE, ATA and ATAPI Block devices -> IDE Chipset support/bugfixes - Enable support for your particular chipset. Disk performance is crucial, especially when recording to relatively uncompressed formats such as mpeg1 or jmpeg. If your disk cannot keep up with the demand it will start to drop frames.
Multimedia Devices -> Video For Linux - This is the API used by programs under linux to grab video from the tv card, so its required.
Sound -> Sound Card Support - Required for recording sound
Sound -> OSS Sound Modules - Required if a video recorder uses OSS
date MMDDHHMM
MM=Month
DD=Day
HH=Hours (24 hour or Military time)
MM=Minutes
Next call hwclock
hwclock --systohc
If you have satellite or digital cable, you can just hit the "Info" button and find the current time. Otherwise you will have to wait till a program comes on, then set your clock to the time the program was supposed to start.
If you have to be off, start recording a minute or two too early, not too late. Shows tend to start on time, and end early to allow for commercials and credits before the next program starts.
PHP - An installation guide for PHP can be found here.
Perl - XML::Twig - Perl is probably already installed in your system. To install XML::Twig type
perl -MCPAN -e "install XML::Twig"
at a command prompt as root
XMLTV - XMLTV is easy to install as of 5.5, and has very few perl dependencies. You can download the latest version here. Just untar the archive, then type
perl Makefile.PL
make install
at the command prompt.
Next, configure XMLTV. Type
tv_grab_na --configure
as root and follow the instructions. If you live outside of North America, replace na with uk or de, depending on what country you live in.
MySQL - You can probably install this from rpm or whatever packaging system your distribution uses, you can download binaries here.
Xawtv - The only real reason you need Xawtv is to change channels on your tv card, if the video record wont do that for you, which most of them wont. Download it at the Xawtv homepage and follow the instruction there.
NVrec aims to be a high quality, generic capture core. At the moment it supports v4l1 and v4l2 devices as video sources, and oss as an audio source. It can output to quicktime (in RTjpeg, YUV2, or RAW format), AVI (in DivX format), NuppelVideo format, MPEG-1, and streaming multicast/unsicast.
NVrec includes deep buffering to minimise frame drops, in high load situations, and a smooth framedropping algorithm to keep the video as smooth as possible if you do have to drop frames. It also has a audio "stretcher" to make sure that exactly the right amount of audio is written to the output file (this compensates for lack of clock synch between video and audio cards).
NVrec is written in an extremely modular way, to make it easy to integrate with existing applications, or add your own output formats. NVrec requires the following programs, again taken from thier homepage
AUTOCONF a recent version (tested
on 2.53) is required for newer nvrec distributions.
AUTOMAKE a recent version (tested
on 1.6.1) is required for newer nvrec distributions.
DIVX4LINUX is required for DivX encoding
support in DIVX4rec.
LIBMP3LAME is required for mp3 recording
support in DIVX4rec.
AVIFILE is required to build the DIVX
tools (currenly only version 0.5.x, 0.6.x and 0.7.x are actively supported).
These are all thats required to get divx4rec or nuvrec working, which are the two you are most likely to use.
divx4rec records in realtime to divx5 format, which means you need a pretty beefy machine. nuvrec is much less compressed and therefore doesn't require as much processor and ram, however the files it produces are very large and not compatible with Windows.
NVRec gets updated regularly, and as a result has alot of nice features and works with the latest version of Divx. It does require alot of resources though, and with the constant updates things can get broken, such as deinterlacing on the current build.
The mjpeg programs are a set of tools that can do recording of videos and playback, simple cut-and-paste editing and the MPEG compression of audio and video under Linux.
lavrec is the part of that package that records from the video4linux device (TV Card) to a MJPEG file, with uncompressed PCM audio. This means that the files are quite large, an hour for about 3 GB in my experience. You can use ffmpeg to convert them to divx5 later, however.
Get binaries in rpm, deb and other package formats here.
You can download the latest version here (direct link).
Untar the archive into a directory that is in your webserver's root, so that you can access it through your webserver. Then cd into that directory and type
./setup.pl
as root. This will start the install process. You should be asked for a few pieces of information
MySQL hostname, root password, username and password for new WebVCR+ user
User and Group the webserver runs as
Location of your crontab
Number of days worth of listings to keep in database at one time
The day of the week to update listings
After entering all this information the script should run and your WebVCR+ should be ready to be configured.
http://192.168.0.201/webvcr/config.php
There are two things on this page that have to be configured first. The directory to store video is pretty self explanatory. That must be set before anything can be recorded. The other required setting is the location of your xmltv listings. Don't worry, they will be created for you in the next step, just type in a directory and filename
example: /home/pyroman/xmltv_listings.xml Click "Save" and then at the command prompt in your webvcr directory, type
./listings.pl
as root. This will take a while, as it grabs your listings and puts them into the database. After this first time you wont have to run listings.pl again manually.
Back in the web configuration you can go to "Video Recorder Configuration" to configure settings such as bitrate, quality and video recorder to use.
If you type in your own video recorder, see the "Help" next to the "Recording Program" field.
You can use the "Movies Running Now","Movies Running Today" or "All scheduled movies" links to see any movies coming on any channel, and record them.
The "Video Library" link will give you a listing of all video files in your video directory set under "Settings". You can browse subdirectories, rename files or delete them.
The "Favorites" link gives you a list of all of the favorite programs you have set. Each favorite is recorded every time it comes on, regardless of the channel. Favorites are also processed by priority, the highest priority being at the top of the list, and lower priorities being under it. If a higher priority Favorite comes on tv during a lower priority favorite, the higher priority will override it. Favorites will override regularly recorded programs as well. See the "Help" page under Favorites for more information