• MultiRecordingCard

This page describes a freevo configuration to support many different and heterogeneous capture cards.

In the following, we will see an example for managing two cards,

• an IVTV card, that is an analog-to-MPEG capture card (Hauppauge WinTV PVR-150) and
• a DVB-T card (ASUS 3000M mini).

First of all, create the following scripts, that are capable of recording from the two devices. For DVB-T we use /home/freevo/bin/record-dvb , that contains

#arguments :
# channel_name_or_number frequency_in_MHz seconds_to_record output_filename
exec mencoder dvb://"$1" -quiet -ovc copy -oac copy -endpos "$3" -of mpeg  -o "$4"

while /home/freevo/bin/record-ivtv contains

#arguments :
# channel_name_or_number frequency_in_MHz seconds_to_record output_filename
ivtv-tune -f "$2"
exec mencoder /dev/video0  -quiet -ovc copy -oac copy -endpos "$3" -of mpeg -o "$4"

Do not forget to 'chmod a+x' the two scripts. Note that the two scripts accept the same parameter list (and ignore unneeded parameters).

Then set up the cards in /etc/freevo/local.conf, using different video groups, as in this example

TV_VIDEO_GROUPS = [
   # Hauppage analog capture card
   #lspci: Internext Compression Inc iTVC16 (CX23416) MPEG-2 Encoder (rev 01)
   VideoGroup( # ivtv device, group 0
    desc='Hauppauge WinTV PVR-150',
    group_type='ivtv',
    vdev='/dev/video0',
    vvbi='/dev/vbi0',
    adev=None,
    input_type='Tuner 1',
    input_num=0,
    tuner_norm="PAL",
    tuner_chanlist='italy',
    record_group=0),
  #ASUS 3000M mini,  USB DVB-T gadget
     VideoGroup(vdev='/dev/dvb/adapter0',
                adev=None,
                input_type='tuner',
                input_num=0,
                group_type = 'dvb',
                record_group=1,
                desc='DVB Viewer'),
                   ]

For the following step, you may need to apply a patch that adds a new field to VCR_CMD, called `group-type'. With this patch, it is easy to record from different sources.

Indeed, we set the VCR_CMD to call different scripts for different video cards, as follows

VCR_CMD = ('/home/freevo/bin/record-%(group-type)s ' +
            ' "%(channel)s" "%(frequencyMHz)s" "%(seconds)s" "%(filename)s"')

Eventually we set up channels for different cards, as follows

TV_CHANNELS = [('www.rete4.com',     'rete 4',
                          'Rete 4', None, 1 ),  #<- from DVB
               ('www.canale5.com',   'canale 5',
                          '38', None, 0,),        #<- from analog input
              ]

As you see, in the 5th field we set the group (that is 0 for analog, 1 for DVB-T) while in the 3rd field we set either the channel name (for DVB) or the channel number (for analog).