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Hi,

Was wondering if it's possible to have VDR record as mpg/mkv on-the-fly? A lot of the documentation is in German by the looks of it, and any plugins that do mention alternate formats are either really old or in German.

Can a recording maybe be piped directly from VDR to say ffmpeg? Does that previous sentence even make sense?

Thanks
Most PVR software writes exactly what it receives. So if it is receiving mpeg2 video and ac3 audio, it will record exactly that in a transport stream container. So yeah you are probably going to get an mpg file out of any open source PVR server. I know TVHeadend has the option to use an mkv container.

I know mythtv can transcode on the fly, I am not sure about VDR. The mainly german resources put me off VDR around 10 years ago and I went with mythtv.
For what reason do you intend to do this?
My rPi, which runs the VDR server and the client (Kodi) stores its recordings on a NAS, which it accesses through wifi. If I decide to re-mux a large recording, it is reading from and writing to the NAS over a relatively poor wifi signal, which can be a lengthy and inefficient process.

I re-mux to MKV because it is much faster to seek through/skip commercials. This might be something to do with the TS format, or something about the way the TS is broadcast where I live. The bigger issue is that sometimes when seeking through a TS, playback will freeze on a certain frame, and I need to stop and re-start playback.
(2017-01-02, 07:26)nickr Wrote: [ -> ]Most PVR software writes exactly what it receives. So if it is receiving mpeg2 video and ac3 audio, it will record exactly that in a transport stream container. So yeah you are probably going to get an mpg file out of any open source PVR server. I know TVHeadend has the option to use an mkv container.

I know mythtv can transcode on the fly, I am not sure about VDR. The mainly german resources put me off VDR around 10 years ago and I went with mythtv.

I actually tried tvheadend when I originally got my first rPi, and while it worked fine for watching TV, I could not get it to work reliably for recording. Used VDR ever since

Edit: I misremembered, it was timeshift (a must-have feature in my opinion): http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=218995
I think perhaps going to a decent backend computer may be a better idea.
You know that you lose certain features when moving from mpeg-ts to mkv? This is i.e. detection of stream changes. In general you set a timer a couple of minutes before start of tv show. When tv show starts additional, even desired, audio and subtile tracks may be added. This is detected on mpeg-ts and video player switches automatically. mkv is not designed for things like that.
(2017-01-02, 10:58)FernetMenta Wrote: [ -> ]You know that you lose certain features when moving from mpeg-ts to mkv? This is i.e. detection of stream changes. In general you set a timer a couple of minutes before start of tv show. When tv show starts additional, even desired, audio and subtile tracks may be added. This is detected on mpeg-ts and video player switches automatically. mkv is not designed for things like that.

I didn't know that, but I have previously been using a simple python script to run mkvmerge on each file, and haven't had any issues. Perhaps such features are not utilised in Australian broadcasts?

The main reason for doing this is the occasional freezing, which has been happening for some time (maybe around a year?) and I think might be rare/difficult to reproduce