Xine pvr:// undocumented feature
I am happy owner of a Hauppage WinTV PVR 150 card. On linux, both mplayer and xine support it but xine has special support for it (in the form a special MRL for it nonetheless) so this is why i prefer it.
The problem i had was that the PVR input for xine by default uses the root directory to store its temporary vob files. The partition that my root is located however is rather small and i could only have very small files (and therefore very small recordings if a paused or wanted to go back in a video).
I wanted to change this location but there is nothing on the documentation. A quick Google search turned up nothing. So i looked in the source code and , sure enough, the kind folks had it documented in the comments of src/input/input_pvr.c.
In other words all you have to do is specify the path in the MRL! Eg:
There are more settings there (like events you can send to tell xine you want teh recording saved instead of being deleted on exit, but i haven’t explored them yet.
Update: I was at #xine on freenode.net and told people about this. 10 minutes later it was fixed in the CVS. Now that’s responsive.
The problem i had was that the PVR input for xine by default uses the root directory to store its temporary vob files. The partition that my root is located however is rather small and i could only have very small files (and therefore very small recordings if a paused or wanted to go back in a video).
I wanted to change this location but there is nothing on the documentation. A quick Google search turned up nothing. So i looked in the source code and , sure enough, the kind folks had it documented in the comments of src/input/input_pvr.c.
pvr:/<prefix_to_tmp_files>!<prefix_to_saved_files>!<max_page_age>
In other words all you have to do is specify the path in the MRL! Eg:
xine pvr://mnt/xine_pvr_tmp_files/
There are more settings there (like events you can send to tell xine you want teh recording saved instead of being deleted on exit, but i haven’t explored them yet.
Update: I was at #xine on freenode.net and told people about this. 10 minutes later it was fixed in the CVS. Now that’s responsive.
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Hi,
Thanks a lot for this information !
I would just add, that if the video device is not /dev/video0, it is not so easy to set another device. The solution is to edit the ~/.xine/config file and add or change this line :
media.wintv_pvr.device:/dev/video2
Tanks, Pascal
You can also change the buffer.
In the xine source code (input_pvr.c), we more exactly read:
xine pvr:/<prefix_to_tmp_files>\!<prefix_to_saved_files>\!<max_page_age>
(Which is probably what was pasted above, but the backslashes got removed)
What’s this mean? We care about maxpageage which can increase the short buffer. Xine has this hard set to 3 in input_pvr.c. Each file it creates is 200 meg, so that’s 600 meg total. In short, it doesn’t amount to much pause time.
If we want to change that number to 2 gig, some simple math would say that number should be 10. For example:
xine pvr://var/tmp/livepause\!\!10
Instead of 600 meg, we now have 2 gig of disk space devoted to pausing live television. Obviously, that 10 can be changed to anything you want.
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