Created 05-11-2005 T. Milius
Changed 11-22-2010 T. Milius
If you want to watch television on your computer, so you are requiring an according receiver. Additionally you will need programs to display the television data. The computer may also act as video recorder. The recordings can be archived on CD or DVD. In case that you are generating the right format at this step you can use DVDs on DVD players.
There are various ways of broadcasting (satellite, cable and terristic) of the television data, which can be sent in an analogue or a digital way. The analogue way has the advantage against the digital one that the signal can be displayed and generated much simpler from the electronical view of sight. At archiving and processing the digital way has advantages and is also able to obtain impressive results of data compression. However usually this leads to restrictions at the processing facilities.
At RISC OS there is the problem to get a receiver for which you can obatin drivers. There are PCI cards and external devices. In case that the signal is analogue all of them will convert it to a digital one first and then sent it to the computer. PCI cards are offering advantages in this case because the data is transported directly to the graphics card and so it will take only performance from the PCI bus but not from the processor. External devices are using either USB or network for the transmission. At USB version 1.1 will provide satisfying results perhaps only in the case that the data will be compressed inside the receiver. That is because of the small bandwidth. USB has also the disadvantage that the manufacturers are not publishing their interfaces. Therefore until now there is no such device which is supported by RISC OS. At PCI cards there are some models for analogue television which can be controlled by the programs !PCITV or Remote. However because of the high data throughput you can't use them for recording television. Digital receivers are passing the already compressed broadcasted data stream directly to the computer. So the stream can be easily recorded but for displaying it must be passed transformed to an MPEG video playing program. For RISC OS !KinoAMP is the only video playing program which is available at the moment.
At the city where I am living end of 2004 with a short transition period classical terristic analogue televison was replaced by digital terristic television (DVB-T). This forced my parents to buy new receivers for all screens. Because I played with the thought since a while to use my Iyonix as a video recorder I persuaded my parents to buy a Siemens Gigaset M740AV as one of the receivers. This is containing two receiving units and can act as usual tv receiver but can also record on a USB disc or on a network drive. The last possibility I am using by providing an according drive on the Iyonix with !smbserver. So the Iyonix acts only as data storage even of I can burn the data with CDVDBurn to CD and can recover it from there on demand. To display the data on the Iyonix it must be converted from MPEG transport format into regular MPEG format. To do so you can use the program replex. Direct television unfortunately isn't possible in the moment. !smbserver in conjunction with my network, replex in pipe mode and !KinoAMP are much to slow.
If you are receiving television by satellite and not terristic, you can use the Siemens Gigaset M750 S DVB-S receiver.
To allow manipulation of the recordings made by the M740 AV (Removal of disturbing publicity blocks) and to simplify the handling of replex, I wrote the program !M740AVUtl.
Replex converts MPEG transport data streams as they are broadcasted by DVB-T and stored in this way by some receivers into regular MPEG files. Marcus Metzler created the program which underlies the GPL licence.
!M740AVUtl provides some functions to manipulate recordings, which have been made by a Siemens M740 AV DVB-T receiver. It is likely that the program will work with recordings made by a Siemens M750 S DVB-S receiver.
!M740AVUtl will automatically correct some problems inside the additional files which may occur in seldom cases. It also allows deletion of parts of the recording. The recordings can't be shown directly under RISC OS in the moment eg. using KinoAmp. So !M740AVUtl provides a graphical user interface for the convertation program "replex" written by Markus Metzler, which I ported to RISC OS with small modifactions for the usage with M740 AV files. The program comes with !M740AVUtl.