TV recorder

[Brian Gaff]

Cannot the tuner just be replaced?. You don't usually mess inside uhf tuners, as the exact placement of components is very important to stability. Brian

[AnthonyL]

[Tim Lamb]

In message <tuf6nc$1v5he$ [e-mail], Brian Gaff [e-mail] writes

Access is the issue with the Toppy. Getting to the back of the circuit board involves major disassembly. Do-able but not included in my current skill set.

[John Rumm]

The complexity does vary significantly depending on where you start. If you have a NAS or PC you don't mind leaving switched on, then the software side is trivial, and boxed network tuners are basically fit and forget.

(You can make it harder - by going for fully custom setups and rolling your own on a raspberry pi, building you own NAS etc - but that is optional)

[SteveW]

My OpenVix/Linux based satellite box is currently set so that 1 and 3 go backwards and forwards 15 sec, 4 and 6 do 1 minute and 7 and 9 do 3 minutes.

There is a plug-in which I have not tried yet, that removes the ads from a recording.

On the other hand, ITV catch-up forces every advert to run its full length.

[SteveW]

OpenVix can use digital terrestrial tuners as well, it does not have to be satellite.

[Tim Lamb]

Hmm. the Silicon Dust job is £154 at Amazon. The PC is left on so that bit is easy.

Whoa!

>

[NY]

I built my own Raspberry Pi4 / TVHeadend PVR, using a dual-tuner DVB-T2 (terrestrial) and a DVB-S2 (satellite). I record to a USB hard disk rather than the Pi's built-in SD card because 1) the card is small, and 2) SD cards don't take kindly to being written to many times over (hence the advice not to defragment them).

It works very well, especially after a recent fix to reset the Pi's memory/cache usage periodically; previously I was getting periods of "continuity errors" in TVH which manifested themselves as glitches in the recording.

I don't use the Pi to store and play the programmes: I access the Pi's disk by a Samba (SMB) share from a Windows PC which stores everything. I tend to watch a lot of TV on the PC, but if we want anything on the big TV I use Plex Server on the Windows PC and PLex Client built into a Roku connected to the TV.

Very complicated, very geeky, but also very flexible: I can edit out commercials and continuity, and when playing on a PC I can use VLC which allows me to pause, single-step, take a screenshot and play at faster than normal speed.

[Michael Chare]

Yes, interestingly I was able to watch a little Formula 1 on the Channel4 app without adverts and without paying. I will try and watch the

[Michael Chare]

programme for the next race from beginning to end to see if there are any adverts.

[Michael Chare]

If you pay £3.99 pm ITVX is advert free.

[Fredxx]

RasPlex is available as a standalone Plex client for the Raspberry Pi.

[Brian]

Try putting a USB memory stick in the USB port of the TV and recording a programme.

Then, pop the stick into a computer. Hunt for the file. Copy to your hard disk.

Try changing the extension to mp4 and try viewing in with VLC, you may be lucky. We have a couple of TVs which use .tsv extension but just changing to mp4 works.

It isn’t a perfect method, you can’t view them in all applications.

I sometime change the extension to mpg then use Handbrake to convert the file to mp4. This seems to give a better conversion.

The above doesn’t always work but it is worth a try.

[Fredxx]

You can always use an application like HandBrake to transcode and make it playable in more applications.

VLC is pretty good at playing anything that is playable. In contrast a Microsoft players expects you to pay for a decoder that is free in VLC.

[alan_m]

I wonder how that works? These days on some channels there is no end of part one type indication, the adverts just suddenly appear and often in places where it's not even the end of a scene.

I find that the jump forward/ jump back buttons on my Enigma2/Openvix box work well for jumping through adverts on timeshifted or recorded broadcast material.

[alan_m]

It may not actually have to be that high to get a clear view of the satellite. There are web sites that allow you to easily determine where you can position a dish to clear any nearby objects.

Yes, I have a box running openvix with 2 satellite and 2 terrestrial tuners and the box can record from all tuners simultaneously. In fact the box can record many other programs at the same time as long as they share the same MUXs or transponders that are tuned in.

[alan_m]

I'm not sure it's ever been available as a spare. The tuner module is soldered to the main board and most (user) tuner repairs have been from a donor machine.

[Andrew]

Paul gave a description of why it may not be possible to use a thumb drive, even if it has the capability because of a check bit that the TV detects and has a hissy fit over.

I use a USB2 bus-powered 2.5 inch 350Mbyte external drive on my single-tuner HD-FOX-T2 and most of the time it doesn't restrict my viewing. While it is recording one HD program you can still watch any of the other HD channels because they are on the same mux.

[Andrew]

Have a look through the postings on Hummy. org. The Aura had a bit of wobbly start.

[The Natural Philosopher]

I have more or less the same except I dont use a Pi - My linux 6TB file server will record, and I can play back via NFS mounts or indeed via a globally accessible webs server.