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Hi,
Was wondering if it's possible to have VDR record as mpg/mkv on-the-fly? A lot of the documentation is in German by the looks of it, and any plugins that do mention alternate formats are either really old or in German.
Can a recording maybe be piped directly from VDR to say ffmpeg? Does that previous sentence even make sense?
Thanks
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nickr
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Most PVR software writes exactly what it receives. So if it is receiving mpeg2 video and ac3 audio, it will record exactly that in a transport stream container. So yeah you are probably going to get an mpg file out of any open source PVR server. I know TVHeadend has the option to use an mkv container.
I know mythtv can transcode on the fly, I am not sure about VDR. The mainly german resources put me off VDR around 10 years ago and I went with mythtv.
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For what reason do you intend to do this?
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2017-01-02, 09:27
(This post was last modified: 2017-01-02, 09:37 by username145.)
My rPi, which runs the VDR server and the client (Kodi) stores its recordings on a NAS, which it accesses through wifi. If I decide to re-mux a large recording, it is reading from and writing to the NAS over a relatively poor wifi signal, which can be a lengthy and inefficient process.
I re-mux to MKV because it is much faster to seek through/skip commercials. This might be something to do with the TS format, or something about the way the TS is broadcast where I live. The bigger issue is that sometimes when seeking through a TS, playback will freeze on a certain frame, and I need to stop and re-start playback.
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nickr
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I think perhaps going to a decent backend computer may be a better idea.
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You know that you lose certain features when moving from mpeg-ts to mkv? This is i.e. detection of stream changes. In general you set a timer a couple of minutes before start of tv show. When tv show starts additional, even desired, audio and subtile tracks may be added. This is detected on mpeg-ts and video player switches automatically. mkv is not designed for things like that.