A new project for Digital Video Recorder (DVR) functions on Linux systems equipped with video capture cards has been launched today on Sourceforge. Here is a brief summary of the project (from the Sourceforge project page) . . .

DVR stands for Digital Video Recorder. DVR is a tool to record movies on a computer equipped with a video capture card. It can record and compress data in real time, using recent codecs like Divx or Indeo 5 for example. See the screenshots to have a better idea of what DVR is. It works under Linux, kernel 2.2 or above, DVR has a graphical interface in order to choose parameters of recording. I hope it is user friendly :-)

Here are the main features . . .

• record movies from a V4L interface under Linux, at 25 frame per second.
  
• save the movie in an AVI file, using modern codecs like DIVX ;-), Indeo, MJPEG, mpg4, etc.
  
• can write data in segmented files, in order to avoid 2GB file size limitation
  
• capture and compression is done on the fly. Provided that you have a good processor you will be able to record long movies without enormous temporary files.
  
• simultaneous preview and capture
  
• fullscreen preview
  
• sound is recorded in mp3 or PCM, depending on your choice. You can also choose frequency, mono or stereo, etc.
  
• horizontal margin removal during capture : it allows you to save disk space and processor ressource when recording movies that have black margins on top and bottom (16/9 for example).
  
• configurable start time and duration. DVR will automatically start to record at a fixed time, and will stop after a fixed number of hour, minute, second. It is especially convenient when you don't want to be present to click on the “start recording” button just before the movie begin ;-)
  
• you can change a good number of parameters (size, image depth, codec attributes, TV parameters, …)
  
• it should work on multi processors machines, and take fully benefit of this type of architectures, as DVR is heavily multi threaded
  
• detailed monitoring during recording (free space left, frames lost, CPU usage, …)
  
• graphical user interface
  
• saves parameters on stop, and reloads them on launch
  

 
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