[plug] PVR advice

[Craig Ringer]

>>>There's another issue you may not be aware of. There is no way to get
>>>suitably formatted TV listing data, say as XMLTV - you currently have to
> 
> Why would that be important? Its not hard to check the TV guide and 
> manually program the shows you want. Not like the US where they have 80 
> channels to search, and consequently the printed TV guides have little 
> info and are hard to read. What are the advantages of xmltv?

Not having to have a printed TV guide or battle one of those websites, 
for one. Also, it makes it easier to handle things like rescheduled 
shows or set the machine to "fire up when BLAH comes on." I guess it's 
not really important, it's just irritating that the local channels 
refuse to provide information in a useful format. Presumably they've got 
an exclusive contract with somebody.

I do agree that it's less useful here. I'd like to be able to do things 
like tell the machine to "keep an eye out for film <blah> and record it 
when it's next shown" though. Or "record show <blah>" and have it handle 
rescheduling etc by it's self. Nothing critical, but part of the 
attraction of a PVR setup is having it just quietly take care of 
recording things. Especially here, where anything may be replaced with 
sport if the network feels like it.

>>>If you want to be realtime encoding _and_ recording,
>>>you'll need a lot of CPU power.
> 
> Mencoder just manages to do realtime divx compression on a 1.2G Duron, so 
> should be able to do simultaneous record and play on any current model.

You'd need to be careful considering a C3 based machine, but otherwise 
that's true. I don't know how good the FPU on the C3 is - I suspect even 
a 1GHz C3 may not really be powerful enough, which is why I mentioned 
that. The C3 is a very attractive CPU for quiet, small systems as while 
it's not powerful it needs relatively little power and the EPIA boards 
it uses are tiny.

Craig Ringer


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