Zaheer Abbas Merali

So while watching 24 after dinner tonight, Alia received a text from her brother in-law reminding her to record channel Five from 6am until 9am tomorrow morning. So naturally, I set it to record on my Sky HD box. However the Sky HD box is being recalled as it is one of the Pace ones that has an unknown fault that is not related to safety. The engineer is due to replace it tomorrow morning. Oh yes, I have been credited 3 months of free HD subscription for the inconvenience. One of the inconveniences is that the only way to get the recordings off the box is via a DVD recorder/VHS recorder connected over Scart.

Anyways that is not relevant to this story. Five is a TV channel that is Free to Air both on DVB-T and DVB-S here in the UK.  So I thought I’d record it on my computer. The natural choice is Gnome DVB Daemon from Sebastian which is a fantastic product from the Gnome GSoC 2008 (my mentoring of this project was very little to do with its success, Sebastian was an excellent student). However my current installation of Gnome DVB Daemon is broken and I didn’t have much time tonight. I started writing a crude one-time use python app with twisted to start recording at 6am and stop at 9am. Then it dawned on me, Flumotion can do this without me writing a single line of code. So I created a simple flow, with a dvb-ts-producer and a disk-consumer. The disk-consumer can take an ics file, so I generated one in Evolution with 2 events: a test event at 23:19 for 5 minutes and the real thing.

Flow file is here:

<planet name=”flumotion-test”>

<atmosphere>
</atmosphere>

<flow name=”default”>
<component name=”producer-video”
type=”dvb-ts-producer”
label=”producer-video”
worker=”localhost”
project=”flumotion”
version=”0.5.2.1″>
<property name=”polarity”>horizontal</property>
<property name=”frontend”>0</property>
<property name=”dvb-type”>S</property>
<property name=”adapter”>0</property>
<property name=”code-rate-hp”>5/6</property>
<property name=”frequency”>10773250</property>
<property name=”symbol-rate”>22000</property>
<property name=”program-numbers”>6335</property>
<clock-master>false</clock-master>
</component>

<component name=”disk-ts”
type=”disk-consumer”
label=”disk-ts”
worker=”localhost”
project=”flumotion”
version=”0.5.2.1″>
<eater name=”default”>
<feed alias=”default”>producer-video:default</feed>
</eater>
<property name=”directory”>/tmp</property>
<property name=”rotate-type”>none</property>
<property name=”start-recording”>False</property>
<property name=”ical-schedule”>/home/zaheer/fivetv.ics</property>
<clock-master>false</clock-master>
<plugs>
</plugs>
</component>

</flow>

</planet>

This created a flow, Here is a UI of flumotion-admin:

Anyways, now it is time to sleep.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009 at 12:32 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.