24/7 Recording - I want to record EVERYTHING, then later pick which bits to keep.

[Brenden]

Hello everyone, here is the description of a setup I would like to emulate, and I'd like to know how possible it is with NextPVR:

One computer, with multiple TV tuners (say, 6), each one recording a different channel continuously, splitting the output into different shows, saving them as MPEG-2s named by time and title, into folders named by date and channel.

Dealing with programs running before or after their EPG-alloted time is not an issue, I'll use ffmpeg or simple windows concatenation to join the ones before and after them together and virtualdub to strip them away again, my main question to you is, could nextPVR be set up to continuously record like this? Some macro to automatically click "record this" for every item on the EPG, even?

ps. I know that the output of this will be HUGE

[johnsonx42]

I believe you could get it to record all shows on a channel (or even all channels) with a manual recording advanced rule: title like '%'

as to all the folder and file naming, that'd be up to you to figure out. If you search for a thread by me titled "nscripthelper making me insane" you'll see the postprocessing batch file I use to rename each recording and update the database. You can probably expand that to do what you want, if you're clever.

npvr records the transport stream sent by the broadcaster. If you want it to be an mpeg-2 program stream instead, you'll need to remux or transcode it in the postprocessing.bat as well.

all in all it seems like a messy way to go about it, but I'll presume you have your reasons rather than take you to task over it.

[whurlston]

Technically, the recording "could" be done with NextPVR but you would need a batch script or similar to move the files to the folders you wanted (The files are already named with title, date and time). You would also need to run a script to read your xmltv file and schedule the recordings if you wanted it fully automated.

Edit: Johnsonx42 beat me to it and explained better.

[Brenden]

I believe you could get it to record all shows on a channel (or even all channels) with a manual recording advanced rule: title like '%'

Thanks for that. The reason behind it all is that I work for an academic library and have staff ask "did you record [..] last night?". This way I can just go back in time and extract it without having to predict requests in advance. There is an existing system we could get that does exactly as I describe.. for several thousand dollars.

The folder names and file structure is of secondary importance, if NPVR can be told "record where title is anything", and it can manage using multiple tuners to do it, and it produces filenames that are reasonably related to what they are recordings of ("Family Guy_20110728_01000130.ts" would be just fine but "20110728_01000130_familyguy" would be better), then I can work with that and use ffmpeg (or similar) to handle file conversions.

edit - it occurs to me that it would be best for me to be able to distinguish channel names as well, so I can get any trailing parts of shows that are cut off by running late. Is the output filename based on a modifiable template? That would be ace.

[mvallevand]

Thanks for that. The reason behind it all is that I work for an academic library and have staff ask "did you record [..] last night?". This way I can just go back in time and extract it without having to predict requests in advance. There is an existing system we could get that does exactly as I describe.. for several thousand dollars.

The license for NPVR only allows personal, non-commercial use so you can't use it this way. If you want to pursue other license here is a link for you http://www.nextpvr.com/licensing/

Martin

[johnsonx42]

yeah, after I posted my response last night I started thinking again about why on earth anyone would want to do that... and I concluded it had to be some sort of non-personal usage model. I in fact came back to this thread thinking I might post a reminder about personal, non-commercial use, but I see Brendan has already 'confessed' and Martin has done the reminding.

[Brenden]

Sorry about this guys, this whole endeavor was an exercise in investigation; I haven't downloaded, installed or read the EULA at this point so I wasn't aware of the restrictions. Now they have come to light, I will not be using this program for this purpose.

ed - Does it still count as "commercial purposes" when it's being used solely within a public school library and not being used to make any profit whatsoever?

[stustunz]

I wonder what a license is worth ?

[mvallevand]

Sorry about this guys, this whole endeavor was an exercise in investigation; I haven't downloaded, installed or read the EULA at this point so I wasn't aware of the restrictions. Now they have come to light, I will not be using this program for this purpose.

ed - Does it still count as "commercial purposes" when it's being used solely within a public school library and not being used to make any profit whatsoever?

I think that is readily addressed by the terms "personal" use only.

Martin

[steeb]

The license for NPVR only allows personal, non-commercial use so you can't use it this way. If you want to pursue other license here is a link for you http://www.nextpvr.com/licensing/

Martin

And steeb is very happy to see Martin referencing the new web pages