tvpvrd

tvpvrd stands for TV Personal Video Recorder Daemon and it’s an open source software project that has been designed to act as a daemon running on Linux/UNIX servers that makes scheduled recordings of TV broadcasts using one or more video capture cards. It also supports video transcoding via FFmpeg.

Features at a glance

Key features include automatic client arbitration, multi-threaded and multi-process architecture, support for recording TV shows simultaneously using multiple video capture cards, support for transcoding multiple video files using user-defined profiles, automatic load balancing, password protected login (optional), transcoding queue management, as well as an efficient command language to schedule and manipulate recordings.

Among other highlights, we can mention easy-to-use support for recurring recordings, which can be set daily, weekly or monthly, complete support for UTF-8 character encodings, support for large files over 2GB, self contained XML based recording database, an efficient TCP/IP port command-line interface that has a small footprint, and support for waking up or power off the server using BIOS Real Time Clock.

In addition, the software offers comprehensive statistics, logging and detailed information about recordings, allows the user to configure it as slave or master for distributed transcoding, a built-in minimalistic web server that provides easy browser access, support for recording TV broadcasts from all available input sources, skinnable web-based interface that can be accessed from mobile devices, e-mail notification and a power daemon to manage the power on and power off functions.

Supported GNU/Linux distributions and availability

tvpvrd is a simple script written in the C programming language and designed to work on almost any GNU/Linux distribution. Besides the universal source archive, which can be used to install the application on any distro, the developer offers pre-built packages for several Ubuntu and openSUSE distributions. Both 32-bit and 64-bit architectures are supported at this time.

What is new in this release:

• All warnings given by static code analyzing through Coverity was fixed. Most warnings where harmless, but there were 6 potential resource leaks on error conditions, 2 potential serious crashes, 1 endless-loop and 6 potential off-by-one mem overwrite errors in corner cases. All in all a very good and humbling exercise to run the code base through coverity.

What is new in version 4.5.0:

• The station list is no longer sorted alphabetically. Instead the order from the channel file is preserved since that might have some logic for the user that makes more sense than plain alphabetical sort.
• Added persistent history to the tvpvrd shell (tvpsh) so that history is remembered between usages on a user-by-user level. History is stored in "~/.tvpsh_history".
• For the Web-UI new themes can be added dynamically. Just add new themes in the daemons config www directory and restart.
• The new Web-UI theme "grey" (which is a clean no-frills "flat" theme) is now the default.
• Some minor UI tweaks/improvements in the Web-UI. ... deletion list disabled if there are no more recordings (as well as submit button)
• New format for arguments in transcoding profiles. The way to specify transcoding parameters have changed. Since both ffmpeg and avconv (that is used for transcoding) is constantly evolving its argument format the old way of simplifying for end users by creating the command line programatically in the daemon is too inflexible. Instead the new way is to specify the complete command line in the profile setting. This makes it easier to keep the daemon and still upgrade to newer version of ffmpeg/avconv and just updated the setting in the config file and not having to wait for a new version of tvpvrd to catch up with the latest command format. This also caters better for advanced users that wants to specify more complex encoding options in the transcoding process.
• Added configuration for modern style Upstart init script for system that uses initctl to start daemons (e.g. newer version of Debian, Ubuntu, Linux Mint etc) This is configured automatically depending on the system
• Re-enable the user setting for deciding if a user login when using the Web-UI should be required or not. This was previously ignored and a login was always required.
• If an XML DB files is specified on the command line the full path is now used. The previous behavior was to use the daemons working directory
• The default templates for the tvpvrd.conf file has been slightly adjusted to enable the Web-UI by default.
• Support for "avconv" as transcoding program. This will make the daemon work out-of-the-box with many debian based systems (incl. Ubuntu/Linux Mint) since they ship with "avconv" as default and not "ffmpeg".
• The setup process detects if either "ffmpeg" or "avconv" is installed and adjusts the template for tvpvrd.conf accordingly. Since "ffmpeg" and "avconv" have different command line arguments there are also two profile directories. The old one is used with ffmpeg and the new "profiles-avconv" is used with avconv. However, ffmpeg is still the recommended transcoder and in case both are available the template will be initialized with ffmpeg.
• libreadline-dev is now required dependency to configure and build the daemon (This is a very common library used by many utilities so it is not unreasonable)
• "configure" will now use "/usr" as default prefix and "/etc" for default sysconfdir so no need to use "configure --prefix=/usr --sysconfdir=/etc".

What is new in version 4.4.5:

• User visible changes:
• Added optional configuration for automatic shutdown behaviour in case there are no more scheduled recordings. This lets you choose if the server should stay powered on or be shut down after the very last scheduled recording has finished.
• Bugs fixed:
• For the case where there are no more future recording the automatic shutdown did not work correctly when the mail-on-shutdown was enabled due to an empty next recording timestamp.
• Internal changes:
• Added more robust handling of poor SMTP servers by adding timeout handling when receiving reply from SMTP server to avoid getting stuck waiting for a reply that never comes.
• Some minor refactoring in the shutdown module.

What is new in version 4.4.4:

• This is a minor release with improved SMTP sender capabilities (better authentication support) and an added check of whether any TV cards have died or have been removed.

What is new in version 4.4.3:

• This version adds theme files for "night" and "deep" which were missing in the autoconf setup.

What is new in version 4.4.2:

• Internal updates for clean compilation with gcc 4.7.2 for use on OpenSuSE 12.3.
• No functional updates.

What is new in version 4.4.1:

• In rare occasions the CSS file was not sent back when the local browser cache was clean and no "IF-Modified-Since" header was found.

What is new in version 4.4.0:

• Commands to adjust settings for video controls (saturation, hue, contrast, brightness) and audio controls (bass, treble, loudness) and volume have been added.
• The configuration file has been updated to allow adjusting default values for the above controls.
• The build environment has been updated to automake 1.12.1 and autoconfig 2.69.
• The installation will now add a pm-utils hook to unload the ivtv kernel driver on suspend/hibernate cycles.

What is new in version 4.3.0:

• This version significantly improves repeating recordings with more options for naming and recording, optimizes usage of ffmpeg for transcoding (which better utilizes the most recent versions of ffmpeg and its new options), adds a number of minor usability improvements in the Web-UI and more controlling options for the layout of the UI in the configuration file, and fixes minor bugs.

Requirements:

• FFmpeg