Recent changes to feature-requests

Different forms for different recorders.

John J. Chambers-Malewig — Wed, 29 Jan 2003 09:21:17 -0000

You might want to look into creating a form for each
recorder program.

I'm really working on a wish from a gini here...

xawtv-common comes with a prog called streamer. It has
a setting for size:
-s 320x240 or 640x480

but there is no entry for that parameter so I would
have to hard code it. you might want to just have a
list of commands that have simple substitutions like
output file name and such.

With different recorder command lines you might be able
to rate the different qualities of recording:

High: -size 640x480 -audio stereo -bitrate 1000
Medium: -size 320x240 -audio mono16 -bitrate 500
Low: -size 160x120 -audio mono8 -bitrate 250

You get the idea.

listings.pl

John J. Chambers-Malewig — Wed, 29 Jan 2003 09:06:36 -0000

Can you create a log file like you do for the record.pl
so a admin can look at the output and see if there are
errors?

I added a 2>&1 to the end of the call to tv_grab_na and
modified the crontab to write to a log file in data:

listings.pl > /tv/data/listings.out

It takes up a few meg but well worth the space to see
why you only have 5 days of programming instead of 9.

setup.pl

John J. Chambers-Malewig — Wed, 29 Jan 2003 08:55:56 -0000

Can the instructions that appear at the end of setup.pl
run be more descriptive?
I mentions configuration before running listings.pl but
does not explicitly tell the user to:

"goto the http://localhost/webvcrplus/config.php with
their fav browser and modify the settings"

I read through it quickly and saw the listings.pl
program and ran that (of course I did not install XMLTV
or run tv_grab_na before I did this) but was sent off
down that route without going to the web site first.

ffmpeg is not a required program but if you leave the
IDLE Time set to 30 as the default and copy a file into
the unconverted directory, cron.sh will try to convert
anything there. Best to set the default to 0
(disabled) and let the user choose to install ffmpeg
and choose a time.

The double // of the location in the perl files are
distracting, know that they resolve to / but it is
strange to see
"/var/www/html/webcvcrplus//settings.php" in an open
statement.

Channel Editor

John J. Chambers-Malewig — Wed, 29 Jan 2003 08:37:14 -0000

An interface to do some channel editing (add or remove)
from the .xmltv when listings.pl is run. Not sure how
to accomplish this, just think it would be a good idea.

perltidy the perl code

John J. Chambers-Malewig — Wed, 29 Jan 2003 08:32:38 -0000

Just a suggestion to send the perl code through
perltidy to get a consistant format.

Documentation

John J. Chambers-Malewig — Wed, 29 Jan 2003 08:30:50 -0000

Just a few things about the HOW-TO:

Since you already have the suggestion of using CPAN for
XML:Twig just have them pull down XML::Writer for XMLTV
while they are at it.

Put the Instructions for XMLTV and the listing.pl file
further down the page, preferably AFTER setup of the
php stuff. Once the access to MYSQL and APACHE and PHP
are working then describe the why to LOAD the channels
and programs ( I spent hours after I ran setup.pl
messing around with listings.pl and would like to have
seen the site before I actually was committed to XMLTV.)

Lastly as you mention, xawtv is not required for this
system. Actually only xawtv-control is need for actual
channel changing (and volume and norm etc.)

I would mention that if they have had no experience
with capture cards (as I was) xawtv is a good place to
start to make sure they have all the drivers and
options set correctly.

Just some ideas.

CVS Release Directories

John J. Chambers-Malewig — Wed, 29 Jan 2003 07:51:11 -0000

CVS Directories should not be part of the distributed
tar.gz...

Can you remove them before you post the new revision using
"cvs export"?

Support for mencoder

Matthew Stone — Mon, 16 Dec 2002 21:32:33 -0000

As an alternative to NVrecord et al.., mencoder (part
of the mplayer package) is highly optimized for DivX
encoding, along with many other Win32 native codecs. I
custom rigged a way to use mencoder instead of the
interfaces provided.

I created a custom script called tapetv:

#!/usr/bin/perl
system("mencoder -tv
on:driver=v4l:width=352:height=240:input=0:device=/dev/video0
:norm=NTSC:chanlist=us-cable:channel=" . $ARGV[0] . "
-ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=m
peg4:vbitrate=" . $ARGV[1] . " -oac mp3lame -lameopts
cbr:br=" . $ARGV[2] . " -end
pos ". $ARGV[3] . " -o '" . $ARGV[4] . ".avi' >
/dev/null");

... and I called it with the custom script:

tapetv #STATION# #VBITRATE# #ABITRATE# #TIME# '#OUTPUT#'

I am able to get 30fps Divx5 encoding at very high and
low bitrates on my Pentium 2 400mhz 128MB ram.

Themes/Skins

Matthew Stone — Mon, 16 Dec 2002 21:25:10 -0000

A fully skinnable / themeable interface for WebVCR+
would improve it immensely.

Save XML program descriptor for shows

Matthew Stone — Mon, 16 Dec 2002 21:20:57 -0000

After a program is recorded, the XMLTV entry associated
with that show should be stored as an XML file along
with the recorded file, or associate the recorded file
with the program information in the MySQL database.
Either way, the info should be displayed/available from
a link from the recorded programs page.