[Freevo-devel] timeshift notes

[Dave Ladd]

I've been playing with the timeshift package for a couple of days. It's 
much better than mplayer with audio pass-thru, from the A/V sync 
standpoint. Many thanks to Thomas for his contribution. Here are a 
couple of notes:

- buffer file: I found that a straightforward timeshift buffer in my 
normal filesystems was hitting the disk too much. Maybe it's just 
because the seeking on my "set-top" box's hard drive is especially 
loud/annoying. Maybe it's because my filesystems are all journalling. 
In any case, I got much better results putting the timeshift buffer on 
a tmpfs file system. The one issue I worry about with that solution is 
how big I can make the buffer, though.

- audio mixing: I ended up changing the mp1e command line to specify a 
non-existent dev file for the mixer device, which allowed me to set up 
the mixer beforehand from the command line. If you think about it, 
timeshifting actually simplifies the overall TV mixing problem quite a 
bit. With timeshifting, you always have the "record side" of the mixer 
set to record TV, and the "playback side" of the mixer set to play PCM 
audio. For instance, in my case, I always want line-in muted (but 
non-zero volume).

- channel changing: I compiled Aubin's "chchan" app and was hoping that 
calling it from Python would work. Unfortunately, it didn't seem to 
work when /dev/video0 was in use. It works fine to initially set the 
channel, but changing the tuned channel in mid-timeshift is not working.

Rather than trying to extend mp1e to do channel-changing, does anybody 
know how to run mencoder instead of mp1e for the encoding half? I had 
initially tried encoding with mencoder, using the default recording 
setup, but the player was unable to figure out what format the stream 
was in. Futhermore, even if mencoder could write an MPEG stream to the 
timeshift buffer, could it also run the slave interface and support 
channel changing?



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