Video Disk Recorder

VDR is a GNU General Public License open source application for Linux designed to allow any computer (that meets the specified minimum requirements) to function as a PVR.

This is the introduction from the web site :

With the availability of high capacity hard disk and MPEG encoders/decoders the idea of a fully digital video recorder comes to mind.

Meanwhile there are several commercial products on the market that implement this functionality. Some of these systems are mainly targetted on working together with special services provided by the system manufacturer, which offer the consumer a personalized recording strategy - and sometimes are available only at extra costs.

The downside of these systems is often the lack of a really flexible timer recording facility, and the manufacturers tendencies to implement new ways of imposing advertisements on the viewer (since it would become too easy to skip the commercial breaks). They also don t support what one would expect to come natural with digital recording: on-disk editing. And finally they won t let you get access to the actual recorded digital data (for instance for archiving).

This project describes how to build your own digital satellite receiver and vdr. It is based mainly on the DVB-S digital satellite receiver card, which used to be available from Fujitsu Siemens and the driver software developed by the LinuxTV project. Unfortunately Fujitsu Siemens no longer offers that card, so you may want to take a look at www.edigicam.de (search for DVB ).

=External links=

*[http://www.cadsoft.de/vdr/ VDR Home page] Official website *[http://pvrguide.no-ip.com/ PVR Guide] Help forum and How-to documents *[http://vdrportal.de/ VDR Portal] German Help forum