DVD Archiving from any PVR

In an earlier post I looked at possible ways of copying video from my Dual PVR to a PC for editing (e.g removing ads) and arching to DVD. One way I looked at was temporarily moving the hard disk from the PVR to the PC and reading it, but I didn’t particularly fancy trying this in practice. However I see from various threads that some people are trying this so I will follow with interest.

Meanwhile, my PVR drive became full with some stuff I didn’t want to delete so I have had to come up with a method of archiving to DVD which works fairly well in practice for any PVR and doesn’t involve any hardware modifications, allowing 1hr of video to be compressed to 700Mb (or even less) and multiple videos to be archived to one DVD. If this has been posted many times before I apologise, but I couldn’t find it when I looked.

I already had what is, in effect, a multimedia PC. It sits in the living room and its sound card is connected to the stereo. All music is stored as MP3 files and is played directly from the PC through the stereo. The video card is also connected to the TV by an S-VHS cable so the PC can playback videos on the TV screen. Crucially, my video card has VIVO (Video In/Video Out) capability, which I had never really used before, but can be used to capture video from the PVR onto the PC. The PC can then edit and compress the video, write this to a DVD and subsequently play back this video from the DVD on the TV screen. While this method offers DVD write capability which is basically free if you already have the video card and DVD writer capability, it does involve some initially tricky configuration settings. However, once you have done a few tests and have the correct configuration, it is quite easy from then on. I will give a short description of the method below and maybe expand this if there is any interest. The PC needs to be reasonably powerful – mine is a 2year old AMD3000XP with 1Gb RAM – and of course have quite a bit of free disk space (say 20Gb).

Video is compressed by various MPEG standards, with MPEG2 used for high quality digital TV signals and for standard DVDs, while MPEG4 offers higher compression with still reasonable quality. I did a few experiments and decided that MPEG4 at about 700Mb for 1hr offerred a good compromise between size and quality for me. I tried various free, open source programs, such as VirtualDub, to achieve video capture and compression but had problems of audio to video/synchronisation which I was unable to solve and which is a common problem according to various internet forums. Instead, I found that Pinnacle Studio 10 video editing software (commercial) which I already had for camcorder editing could capture video and audio in perfect synch from the PVR and that DivX (free) could then compress this into MPEG4 Other methods may be possible, but once I had found one that worked, I stopped trying any others!

The video-out (CVBS) from the PVR is connected to the video-in of the video card and the audio-out of the PVR is connected to the line-in of the sound card. Pinnacle Studio 10 is then started and video capture selected. A capture format of MPEG2 at 720x576 was selected and a capture source of the video card (in my case this is ATI Avstream Analogue Capture (DirectShow)) at 16:9. Set the stop capture timer to the length of the video, set the write file location/name, start the PVR playing and then start Pinnacle Studio capturing at the start-point and you can then go off while capturing takes place automatically and the video is displayed on-screen.

When the video capture is finished it can then be used directly to create a standard or compressed DVD or it can be edited first. In my case I use the Pinnacle editor to remove any ads and trim the start and stop times, saving the edited file as an MPEG2 file, DVD compatible.

The completed MPEG2 file can then be used to create a standard DVD (Pinnacle can do this), but I prefer to further compress it and archive about 7hrs of video on one DVD (higher compression is possible, but at lower quality). Pinnacle Studio can itself perform further compression to MPEG4, but I got much better resuilts from the DivX converter program which can be downloaded as a free trial from www.divx.com . I had hoped to use the free VirtualDub and XviD software to do this, but this combination couldn’t read the Pinnacle MPEG2 files. The MPEG2 file is ‘dragged’ into the DivX Converter, which is set to Home Theater output and a .divx MPEG4 file is created. This can be played on the computer or TV screen using the DivX player software, which is free to download. Once a DVDs worth of compressed, edited video is assembled it can be burnt to a blank DVD using software such as Nero. The source files can then be deleted from the PVR (and PC) and the PVR then has some space again!

It sounds quite complicated, and indeed it was to get the various bits all working together with good quality video and audio stored in a very compressed form. But now that it is working its really rather easy to use, and only requires a few mouse clicks to archive each video and make the PVR into an even more useful gadget.

I know the quality of this method is not as good as by direct extraction from the PVR HDD or by using an RGB input to the PC, but it works fairly well and has allowed me to free up space on the PVR until another method is available.

Playing the recordings out through a SCART to a DVD Recorder is perhaps the easier method to do real time copies. You can then edit the disk recording easily on your PC to remove adverts etc. and re-burn if necessary.

I actually use a DVB-T card on my PC for freeview recordings I anticipate I will want to keep on DVD, which removes one tier of compression from the process. Budget cards can be purchased from around £20 these days.
Last edited by Technonotice : 22-02-2007 at 13:12

The idea of transfering files to a PC hard disk is not only to allow for editing, which is not possible in real time, but also because of quality. By directly playing with the Transport Stream files stored on a PVR, quality loss can be easily kept to a minimum. Also programs can be perminantly archived to a large HD in it's original state, not just transfered to DVD. Personally, it also allows my Mother to watch programs easily that I have recorded on my PVR using an HDD Media Player (such as the cabinets you can buy from Maplins for around £70), without using a full PVR which would not fit into where she keeps her Telly. Transfer to a PC via capture is nothing new. Pinnicle have done their 'Dazzle' range of capture devices for some time, and their top model which also sells at Maplins for around £70, will capture in as best quality you are likely to get as a normal end user (ie none professional), using the standard Scart or CVBS output from an STB or PVR.

No - the one big point which has been missed in wishing to go to such lengths to recover files from a PVR HDD, is purely for interest and shere 'devilment' as it were. Reading the Threads posted on this site on the investigative work done on the Hummy (Humax 9200T) and Fusion models, is very compelling, and the interest in others it has generated speaks for it'self. Even if Digihome came out tomorrow with a model that conveniently stored files directly to PC without any fuss, I would still want to find out more about how it was done, and see if any improvements could be made. As it is, Digihome might produce some form of archiving for their next model, but in the meantime, a home-brew technique will be very welcome, spured on by my strong interest in computing and electronics stemming from graduation in Maths and Physics, and a need to keep my mind active (I'm disabled unfortunately, and am limited it when and what I can do). Such is life I suppose!

Nevertheless - An interesting thread - I will look more closely at Graphics cards with VIVO capability. Thanks.

Tim.
Last edited by Nutty Timbo : 22-02-2007 at 14:38

That's where my DVB-T card solution comes in. For just £20 you capture the original streams and can keep them on the PC hard drive, stream to other PC's on the home network or burn to DVD.
http://technonotice6.googlepages.com/streaming.html

I guess the point was to use what hardware/software I already had in my PC to create archive DVDs and free space in the PVR, rather than buy yet another box such as a DVD Recorder. Along the way the stuff I learned about different video compression Codecs and audio synchronisation by playing with VirtualDub and XviD was very interesting. The compressed MPEG4 video is quite acceptable to me, even via a composite cable, and preferable to the larger number of DVDs required for MPEG2 storage.

I would like a still better method of transferring compressed video from the PVR to DVD without buying another box. Your comment about the DVB-T card is interesting and I will look into this. Mounting the PVR hard disk in a PC meets the spirit of true hacking and would give a great advantage in transfer speed over other methods.

An interesting thread...
A couple of years back I had a VIVO graphics card (ATI) and my memory of it is that it is used as an analogue to digital converter - no more, no less. At that time I had an analogue video camera but since upgrading to digital it is simply a case of using the Firewire connections and importing straight into Pinnacle (or whatever), I don't believe there to be a need for VIVO in this situation as surely the information on the PVR is stored digitally?

Hi again.

I already have tried a number of DVB-T tuner card devices for the PC, and the quality is very poor in comparison to storage within a PVR. The problem lies in that a PC is not specifically designed for streamed video, whereas a PVR is. The disk drives in a PVR are specially designed to accept the Transport Stream quickly and efficiently, without too much error checking, which is present on a standard PC drive (slowing down transfer). Also there are considerations such as block size/defragmentation, which all effect the quality. A PVR just records the true TS record, whereas the DVB-T software attempts to translate directly into an MPEG2 or AVI file. The above regularily results in dropped frames and other indiscretions, which even after using ProjectX to clean up the output, programs such as Nero will complain about, with all kinds of synch. problems etc, or more likely, refusing to burn a disk altogether (as has my experience has been using Nero Premium 7).

Mounting a PVR drive as a slave drive within a PC is not always to be recomended because of their specially designed nature (even though they are IDE drives). It is much safer to use a standard IDE to USB interface, which if using USB 2.0, is just as sufficient as if internally mounting the drive. Plus, the drive can then be powered independantly of the PC (PVR drives are designed to use less power then PC drives, and power supplies are quite an issue with them, especially if trying to do the opposite and mount a PC drive within a PVR box).

Regards,

Tim.

Tim

If you use the software bundled with the DVB-T card then yes the default is usually to turn the data into mpeg2 however, most programs also let you record the full transport stream (an entire multiplex) in one go or change the capture format for a single channel.

I prefer to use linux these days and VLC for linux (freeware) can manipulate the streams very well, see http://technonotice6.googlepages.com/recording.html and http://technonotice6.googlepages.com/linux.html

For even easier viewing and recording I am also now using Kaffeine (freeware) but I haven't yet put together my own web pages for it. See http://docs.kde.org/development/en/extragear-multimedia/kaffeine/dvbwindow.html
This shows a DVB-S card but it does work equally well with DTT.

Another big plus point for the DVB-T card method is you don't have to keep disconnecting and reconnecting your PVR hard drive, which may lead to damage in the longer term.
Last edited by Technonotice : 23-02-2007 at 10:54

Thank you again for the info. and links.

The PVR drive is usually not continually connected, and disconnected, as you rightly say, this could easily lead to damage. There are quite a few examples of modifications made to various boxs, including the 'Hummy' (Humax 9200T) and the Digifusion (sorry, havn't the links to hand, but can readily supply them). One example is that of son_t on this forum :

http://humaxdisk.wikispaces.com/Disk+Cabling+and+Mods

I hope to modify a Digihome as soon as health and pocket allow. It should be quite easy because there is alot of room in the box, and has a niffty little door on the front which is as yet unused, which could perhaps hide the USB socket.

It is interesting to note, that despite Humax already providing a rather 'half-baked' USB connection for their box, it has still been found necessary to open the lid and make a seperate interface which is much quicker and more easily accessed. Plus, additional programs have been successfully written to pull the programs straight from the PVR disks with little fuss, and very quickly.

It is to be noted that these modifications are permanant, and have been quite inventive, especially for the Digifussion boxes.

Regards,

Tim.

Hi, some interesting comments to my post.
Shaddax, yes the information is stored digitally in the PVR (in some form of MPEG2 compression) and it would be nice to get at it that way, but there is no standard connection to do this (the RS232 is too slow, even if the software could be modified to use this) . This is why people look at things such as reading the PVR HD. Standard connections are only composite video or RGB via the SCART connector. I didn’t manage to get RGB working (using a specially modified cable) but got a very acceptable result using composite, especially given that the video is compressed anyway, which leads to some loss of quality.
Nutty Timbo, there is a distinct lack of information about how my VIVO card (an ATI Radeon X800 XT VIVO) works – but I believe there is some form of MPEG compression in hardware from the RAGE theater chip that makes this into a VIVO card, it is much more than just A/D conversion. VirtualDub/HUFFYUV Codec can accept uncompressed, raw video from this card but the file sizes are huge (30+Gb for 1hr) and I still got audio synch problems. I found MPEG2 a good mechanism for capture, editing and further compression to MPEG4. There are 0 dropped frames reported by Pinnacle when doing any MPEG2 capture and no audio synch problems, whereas VirtualDub did report dropped frames and always lost audio synch when using various different types of Codec – unusable since a lot of the stuff I like to archive are musical performances. The hard disk is defragged first and is plenty fast enough (SATA).
I may very well try the USB interface to the PVR HD in the future, mainly to get increased speed, but will follow others experiences first in other threads. Good luck!