Smart Home Blog

Yesterday I heard a good news. LinuxMCE development team decided to use the latest stable release of VDR instead of 1.4.7. Right decision indeed. VDR 1.6.0 includes a lot of improvements like support of UTF-8, better integration with CAM, better implementation of functionality to decode HD signal. With support of UTF-8 it shouldn’t be any problems with displaying of Russian EPG on the on-screen menu and showing correctly Russian names in the recorded file names. Which is not possible with version 1.4.7 without UTF-8 patch. Improvement of HDTV support is also important because many people want to watch HD on their wide screen TVs.

The first version of LinuxMCE 0710 Beta 4 (maybe it’ll be Beta 5) with VDR 1.6.0 will be available in the beginning of April. Hope it’ll include some improvement for VDR on media director as well.

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As you may know LinuxMCE in the version 0710 supports two personal video recorder systems: MythTV and VDR. This brief howto will help you setup VDR.

Installation

VDR can be chosen by two ways. The first one is initial configuration after installation. During setup the media center property you should choose VDR and not MythTV. The second way is to tick VDR and tick off MythTV on the Software modules page - Wizard –> Media Directors. In both cases VDR will be installed automatically and will start after installation.
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Recently I thought about integration IPTV and LinuxMCE. Since satellite or analog TV can be watched, paused and recorded by VDR or MythTV it’d be nice to have similar for IPTV. That plug-in for VDR offers such functionality. IPTV plug-in allows to manage IPTV channels same manner as for DVB once. It supports both multicast UDP/RTP and unicast HTTP MPEG1/2 transport streams. Moreover there is a possibility to get also other formats like MP3 radio streams, MMS video streams and so on.

Personally, I like VDR more and more. Especially after announcing next version LinuxMCE which should contain VDR as alternative to MythTV. But I don’t understand how to connect IPTV stream to the VDR box. All IPTV providers offer TV service only via their own set-top-box (STB). In case of using IPTV plug-in with VDR it’ll be like STB. Will providers allow that? I guess no. But idea is good: consumers get all types of TV in one place - VDR, IPTV providers don’t need a special equipment and UI. But this is just a dreams

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Here is a free service offered Electronic Program Guide (EPG) for media centers which based on Video Disk Recorder (VDR). Its interface is available in three languages: English, German and Russian. Just register a new account and follow by instruction to setup it in your VDR.

As I already mentioned the service is free but it has a small limitations. There is a possibility to take VIP account but it isn’t clear how to do it (it isn’t sold for money). But I suspect that free options should be quite enough.

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If you’re owner of HTPC with Video Disk Recorder (VDR) and have enough interesting recorded media content you might use vdrtube to share it similar way as it’s done with YouTube. That VDR plug-in adopt video to display in Flash-player and build HTML structure to access it via web browser.

Plug-in allows to create themes. So, you can customize YourTube according to your desire. Also, there is a possibility to control access to your media content using Apache authorization functionality. Plug-in vdrtube is developed on Perl. It’ll be pretty easy to modify it if you don’t satisfy its work.

Actually, it’s a good possibility to share your video between relatives or friends. But personally I prefer to have plug-in which allows to watch YouTube video on TV using VDR or MythTV. But currently as I know only Windows MCE offers such feature.

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