DVB based PVR Idea

[Lifter]

Warning, this post will be long. Ok, I'm not a programmer, but I think I have an idea of how to integrate support for DVB cards within Xlobby with what I think would be a minimal amount of work on Steven's part.

My HTPC dream is to have full PVR functionality for my satellite service ala Snapstream/Sage without using nasty analog capture and recompression. In addition to preserving every bit of quality, I could also take advantage of software MPEG decoders and post-processing filters like FDDshow.

DVB cards, in conjunction with programs like MyTheater and ProgDVB allow viewing and recording these transport streams without any recompression. However, the EPG system is supposedly really bad and there are no VCR-like controls. Nobody in the DVB forums has come up with a reasonable solution to this. Some have undertaken writing WDM drivers for particular cards to allow Snapstream/Sage compatibility, but that just sends the decompressed stream to the PVR software (and therefore needs to be recompressed). Some people are literally looping svideo out from the DVB card into a PVR-250. Absolutely terrible. But I think I may have a solution.

Let's say Steven creates a simple EPG that just reads the xmltv data and sends Girder events upon selecting a show. No worries about capture card support or anything like that. It's just a frontend.

With the Girder events in motion from Xlobby, Girder could tune to the appropriate channel in MT/ProgDVB, and immediately tell MT/ProgDVB to start recording the stream to a scratch folder. The A/V rendering will be turned off in MT/ProgDVB, so PC resources are not wasted on that- it just tunes to the channel and starts recording.

Immediately following this, Girder can open up any MPEG2 player (like Zoomplayer) which will start playing back this "scratch stream" using a Girder script. Right there you have your pause, rewind, etc- just like you would on a TiVo or Snapstream/Sage. A little more advanced Girder scripting would be needed to manage the scratch files, but that's not too difficult (since I can do it).

To schedule recordings, that would just be a matter of incorperating the same idea in conjuction with timers built into Xlobby.

Sorry for drawing this out so much, but what do you guys think?

[noviceboy]

Tis done. I sent the code for this to steven. Have it working with xHTPC's epg and my DVB TV software. Just waiting for Xlobby EPG to switch it over completely.

FYi I use watchtvpro for DVB-S ( costs 20 Euros but picture quality, reliability and functionality is great) believe me, I have tried the rest.

What we all really want is a simple program using DVBcore with mininal interface and it listens to windows messages. Then you could simply integrate this into many scenarios.

But as u know, us DVB people will have to wait, while enjoying super DVD quality pictures.

[QTips]

I also have DVB and tried that method you mentioned.
It worked but changing channels was awful slow cause I used .bat files with commandlines to feed myTheatre/Progdvb.It was a delay for about 2-3seconds before they actually starts changing channels.My next step was to E-mail the authors about getting the sendmessages commands parameters so Xlobby could send those to the program directly.That would be a pretty neat feature and would worked seamless for most users.
But...not much response from the authors

With sendmessages commands I have fully integrated zoomplayer to show tvrecords and musicvideos in Xlobby so hopefully someday I can with live DVB too