DVB Recording and editing in Linux

[GraDy]

Hi there!
As the swedish government has decided to shut down the analouge terrestial network, we swedes will soon have to buy ourselves either
a) A set top box
b) a dvb-t pci/usb device for our computers.
The later sounds far more interesting to me, so I started to "investigate" the support for DVB in Linux.
I need to be able to:
Watch
Record
Edit
Demux and
Encode the TS-streams.
http://www.linuxtv.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page was a very useful resource for me in my glorious quest :).
To sum up what I have found out:

What card to buy?

For DVB-T http://www.linuxtv.org/wiki/index.php/DVB-T_cards has some info about this matter. From what I have gathered the AverMedia 761/771 seems to be well featured, well supported and quite cheap. Is anyone experienced with this card in Linux?

Watching and Recording

Kaffeine and Klear appears to be the best graphical apps for watching/recording.
Unfortunately for us Gnome-users, both of them are KDE apps. This means a lot of dependencies.

http://www.klear.org/
http://kaffeine.sourceforge.net/ (doesn't work for me), http://sourceforge.net/projects/kaffeine

Demuxing and Editing

ProjectX is available for linux, but it can be hard to understand from their German homepage. Luckily, sf is in English :P

http://www.lucike.info/index.htm?http://www.lucike.info/page_projectx.htm
http://sourceforge.net/projects/project-x/

For editing there's always avidemux. Since the files are demuxed, they should be supported in most editors, correct?
You can also use avidemux to encode the files (it supports most free/open codecs, such as mpeg1, mpeg2, XviD, x264 etc)

http://fixounet.free.fr/avidemux/ (yes, it's about the ugliest site around, but it's readable. And the app has a standard GTK2 interface, the screenshots are just taken with a butt-ugly theme :P)

I'm also thinking about burning the files to DVD, but AFAIK it should just be a matter of adding the video and audio to a authoring program. I'm not aware of anything like DVDpatcher for Linux. If there isn't there's always wine or dualboot.

http://dvdauthor.sourceforge.net/

If anything I've written is wrong, don't hesitate to tell me so. If anyone is experienced with DVB in Linux, please share your views on this with us.
Does anyone know of a GTK2 app for watching/recording DVB?

Anyways, I hope I helped someone. Hopefully someone can fill out the parts that are incomplete/unclear.

:)

[mean]

Personnally, i'm using an hauppauge Nova-T with kaffeine

It is very easy to set-up with kaffeine which offers to download the frequency table / scan the channels for you.

As for editing, projectX to repair and fix the a/v sync issue in the TS file, the butt ugly application mentionned earlier. for encoding

[GraDy]

Nice to hear from someone actually doing this!
I pressume that you are using the new version of the card (i.e that is newer than 1 year)?
What distro are you using? Did you have to patch your kernel in order to use it, or did it work out-of-the-box?
Have you tried burning the files to DVD?
Sorry for all the questions, I'm just curious :P

[mean]

Yes, it is the CX88 based version
I'm using gentoo and had to patch the kernel using the patch available on the bytesex.org (it was not hard, except that the cx88 was hard disabled on that kernel, so i had to manually change some stuff)

Once the device appears in /dev, run kaffein and a new tab (DVB) will appear and after that it is really simple to set up.

I did not try burning the file as is (just remultiplexed), as in france the gop size seems to be ~3 seconds which breaks the DVD specs.

[GraDy]

mean: Thanks a lot :). The Nova-T might be worth considering also, then.

[GraDy]

BTW, does anyone know if DVB subtitles are supported or not? Would be nice to know since some channels here in Sweden use them :).