make viewer for linux

[zehd]

A few years ago, when I first started looking for PVR software,
I was good at Windows, Linux was intimidating and counter intuitive. I kept hearing about how a linux head could do so much cool stuff. But everytime I tried it, something got in the way.

I was just then starting to download clips and torrents, and they mostly came in AVI (divx/xvid) and so it made sense to find a PVR software that recorded in that format.

I passed by on GB-PVR several times, because at the time, it seemed to be very MPEG-centric.

I finally tried it, and with that saw huge file sizes that I wanted to compress, so I flirted with Post Processing transcoding.

Then I got into the MVP, and realized that the VERY BEST way was to leave a file in MPEG format (if it was already recorded in that format) so there was no on-the-fly transcoding...

Sure I got ZProcess to help with most of my on-the-fly transcoding of non MPEGs, but it was never as good as just clicking an mpeg and shuttling around, and pausing and resuming, etc...

The NMT gives people a chance to do less on-the-fly transcoding (if not eliminating it altogether), but some formats still are better than others for a USER EXPERIENCE. It seems that if you want to have the same playback/pause/resume/comskip as a PC Client or a server can do, you have just a couple of native formats to work with again.

It is my feeling that a developer must make certain decisions at the outset of a project; it shapes the future. Sometimes, it's impossible to see the needs of the end user. Sometimes it's impossible to meet the needs of every potential user.

But then there are far too many interpretations of what the project means to a user. A User inherently uses, and must live with the inherent limitations of design that someone else has developed.

A user does not know of the brick walls that pop up at 4:00am in the morning, forcing a developer to create workarounds; usually making core decisions that will affect the shape and destiny of the project, and therefore make redesign ultimately impossible.

Henry Ford said, when releasing his Automobile to the market, "Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black". Black was a faster drying paint, and he was able to make the product quicker, without hurting the quality.

In this day and age, with people able to customize so much, perhaps we should all take a moment to realize what is actually at stake here.

Customization should never outweigh functionality and stability.

Some very smart people have put their brains together and made some decisions that ultimately provides an incredible project. Those decisions had to be made. And there had to be very specific Captains steering course.

If GB-PVR and it's third-party contributions were all open source, and required grand town hall meetings to discuss anything and everything, we may still be trying to decide the paint colour.

But don't let this stop anyone from writing their own contribution. If someone, very adept at writing linux applications, wishes to actually Captain that ship, I'm sure there will be a sea of support from everyone.

[kruglovus]

Actually I don't want people to shut up, I want the feedback much earlier so I don't waste my time You are the second person writing this month complaining about the NMT player's because you like to archive to non-mpeg before viewing knowing that in doing this you will lose most of the GBPVR functionality that sub and I added. I hope you are in the minority but with recent interest on compression on the main board, if this is the trend, then I am definitely going in the wrong direction with both GBPVR as a server and any client I can envision for it.

Martin

Actually, I only now realized that the GBPVR functionality on NMT like skipping backward/forward is part of mvpmx2. I had never thought of it before, simply assumed it was part of NMT's firmware or something. MKV playback was never meant as complaint, even less so as an insult to the mvpmx2 developer (great product, by the way). Forget about the complaint. My point was that a PC client is more versatile and flexible, than NMT or MediaMVP.

I like the idea of porting mvpmx2 to linux. And though I'm just above a newbie level in linux, I'd like to give a try. Where can I get the source code for mvpmc?

About compression. I like to record analog TV at high quality, or 9000 kbps, which gives me about 2.5GB per hour of TV show. Converting it to H.264 using Handbrake at 1300 kbps leaves it at about 650MB per hour. Huge HDDs and their falling prices are valid, but even a 1TB drive can hold only about 180 2-hour sport shows at that quality. Compressing is easy and quadruples this number. And GBPVR PC server and client play H.264 MKV exactly like MPEG, with all the functionality.

[Jaggy]

I can actually see both sides of this discussion, I understand why the emphasis was on mpeg playback for the MVP as that is all it can playback natively but now we have the NMT which can playback all sorts of formats natively I wonder if it is just a bit of a hangover from the old MVP days that some more formats haven't been implemented (yet?).......not having ANY idea what this means in the way of development for sub or Martin?

I am not totally convinced a PC client of the same price range would be/is all that much more versatile or flexible than the NMT is/could be.

I can also understand with the size of digital recordings why users are converting their recordings & while I agree HDD space is relatively cheap these days....cheap is also a relative term!

[mvallevand]

This is what I wanted to see, a healthy discussion. Fundamentally mkv and avi files are containers not video formats which makes them by nature difficult to support. GBPVR primarily supports hardware or direct-to-disk mpeg in ps and ts containers and sub just passes mkv's to Windows for playback. He would have to rebuild his server components to parse, navigate and control a client (linux pc or media extender) or write a player more powerful than XBMC all by himself

For space as I've said I consider transcoding archival. I think GBPVR is missing a process to automatically archive after a file a set period, there is only parallel and post processing batch files. Automatic archiving would allow playback with the original quality, and saves the heavy processing on files that you don't want to keep.

I'll end by saying I prefer NMT stytle navigation over GB-PVR's so I am also biased of how bad a flaw non-mpeg playback is.

Martin