Fwd: Re: lg dvd recorder disks wont mount

[Les Gray]

On Tuesday 28 August 2007 11:41:50 James Takac wrote:
>  I have just such a device. Is an A828 AverMedia device linux compatable?
> That's the one I have.  

Yep, it's advertised as such by the manufacturer - 
http://www.avermedia.com/cgi-bin/products_digitvtuner_dvbshybridA828.asp

A good place for checking out linux compatibility for this kind of hardware is 
linuxtv.org (in the wikis). This is the website of the dvb/v4l kernel 
developers.

> And one of the reasons I do as I do is it frees up 
> the pc for other things for longer periods. It takes a fraction of the time
> to grab the mpeg file from the disk than to do a capture via the 'puter.
> Currently am setup to record 2 movies whilst I convert a number of others

If this setup works for you, then stick with it :)

As far as digital TV goes, I find the following workflow does the job really 
well -

1. Use dvb-utils to tune the desired channel on the command line, then dump 
the stream to a .ts file in another terminal window. Press Ctrl+C to stop 
recording.

2. Edit and demultiplex the .ts file using the Java-based Project X. This is a 
brilliant little app, which you can download from doom9.net

3. Remultiplex to DVD-compliant .mpg using mplex (part of mjpeg-tools).

4. Author DVD using DVD Styler. It's a crime that this isn't in the Ubuntu 
repos (I got it from debianmultimedia.org), because I think it's the best DVD 
authoring app linux has ATM. The ones which are in the repos are either buggy 
or unnecessarily complicated to use.

5. Burning can be done from within DVD Styler, unless you're using 
already-used rewritable media. A bug in growisofs (which seems to come and 
go) causes the burn to fail in this case. Then it's just a matter of telling 
DVD Styler to create an .iso image which you can then burn to DVD using k3b 
or you're favourite burning app.

If you want to squeeze everything on to a DVD5 then mencoder is a good tool to 
use. But I find myself doing this less and less these days, seeing that Dual 
Layer media are only about $4.30 a pop, and it's not as if I'm recording TV 
every day. Plus I couldn't be arsed re-encoding everything to divx/xvid, and 
my standalone player doesn't support those formats anyway.

The beauty of having a Linux PVR is that you can use the command line to 
record. The Windows way of using the software that came with your USB device 
or TV card means that you're depending on that app not to crash while you're 
recording, something which is far less likely to happen (if not impossible) 
with a terminal window, which has negligible system overhead.

Les