Pretty much all of the below is outdated, but these are current patches I used for Fedora 27 to get the TBS6680 card drivers to work:
Since December 2001 I have been building my video system, and this page lists various changes to different parts of available software I have made. Some of the patches I use, some not, and some are already included in official releases.
My system shortly consists of an underclocked silent AMD Athlon in a big tower casing, and two Hauppage Nexus DVB-C 2.1 cards with 200GB of disk space. VDR with latest CVS version of DVB drivers is installed on SuSE Linux system.
cut_in_place.cc - Cuts a recording in-place, that is, does not make a copy of a recording when cutting but moves, destroys and overwrites original files. I wrote this in one day so there must be some bugs left - but on the other hand, I have now been using it for 2 years, so they are maybe not so bad. 2005-12-31 Andreas Brachold found a bug in handling comments in the marks file, that has been fixed now.
The handling of video stream is not fully compatible with standard VDR editing. Differencies are not big:
To install this program, compile it, place it somewhere and add this line to your /video/reccmds.conf:
You need to set the Maximum recording size to 100MB or something small anyway in Recordings menu to fully enjoy faster cutting times.Cut in place : /usr/local/bin/cut_in_place
vdr-append.cc 0.3 - A simple utility to append other vdr recordings to one recording. This operation is irreversible (at least it is not easily, you need to manually move files back..) if you use the -m flag. If you do not use the -m flag, the files are just linked to a new directory. This means you should not delete the created recording unless you want to delete the originals also - vdr follows symlinks!
hdstatusd.c - a simple daemon to monitor if the ide disks are spinning. Logging to syslog.
getfrontend.c - read the frontend
settings. CVS driver since 2003/05/19 13:56:21 is needed. Usage:
getfrontend /dev/dvb/adapter0/frontend0. Only works for
DVB-C. Easy to modify though. Updated 2003-08-11: now displays signal and
error status too. Example:
getfrontend /dev/dvb/adapter0/frontend0
Signal=65535, Verror=10, SNR=61423dB, QAM_128, FREQ=282.988477MHz, SR=5.900000Msym, INV=OFF, BlockErrors=0, (S|L|C|V|SY|)
Note: prune.diff is not needed in 1.3.11 and later!
prune.diff - makes my Recordings-menu to
react 10 times faster on some conditions and prevents the 60 sec
watchdog from tripping. My setup has file size limited to 100 MB, for
historical reasons (I had a FAT partition that corrupted files on
crash) and also because I want to experiment with in-place editing
with minimal copying of files. Anyway, this reduces number of stat64
calls in the find command from 3400 to 860 in a 100G partition, and
makes the menu usable again.
The trick is to stop scanning *.rec and *.del directories, so that *.vdr
files are not stat'd.
Note that this patch does not work, correct one was made by
someone, I'll dig it up some day:
magichour.diff - a patch to handle the dst -> standard time magic hour the best
possible way. The algorithm in
the patch to find a good guess on the correct utc time from local time is
somewhat tested, but I have not yet tested the full patch. I hope people
create many funny timers for next sunday and see if this works.. :-) Note
that the magic hour is 03:00 - 03:59 in TZ=Europe/Helsinki, 02:00 - 02:59
in TZ=Europe/Berlin and 01:00 - 01:59 in TZ=Europe/London.
The patch makes two guesses of the correct utc time and then chooses the
first one if it is a timer start time, and later one if it is the end
moment. This way always at least enough is recorded.
vdr-epglinger.diff - Add showing a bit old EPG event information if necessary. Sometimes the programming is late and one would like to see what is the description of the program that is actually running, but is late. Setting EPG linger to say 10 minutes usually is enough to catch the name of the late show.
vdr-1.1.26.diff - my old vdr diffs. Parts of this diff are just my local setup, parts are new translations to Finnish, parts are some small setups bits and parts try to minimize hard disk usage - I mean I try to prevent hard disk spinning up when not absolutely necessary.
Diffs for DVB drivers are no more needed for Technotrend DVB-C since 2003-05-19 CVS HEAD.
dvbtune diffs
Use this to monitor the AFC register. Prints out auto fine tuning
offset in MHz. Example:
./dvbtune -f 297000000 -s 5900 -qam 128 -I 0 -m
How to find channels in DVB-C network?
Step to step instructions how to use the patches and programs above to
find the channels.conf to use with VDR. This is no more
up to date with 1.3 as VDR tunes the PID's mostly automatically.
Hauppage DVB-C serial numbers I have seen.
These are the serial numbers and distinctive marks that I know
some working and non-working cards have.
Information about DVB-C in Turku, Finland, by Jan Ekholm
RGB and S-video cables by Matjaz Thaler and by VDR portal
Diffs for DVB driver, patch version 7
This only implements FE_GET_FRONTEND ioctl, so that it is easy to
monitor the frequency AFC. This was committed to CVS on 2003-05-19.
Use getfrontend.c above to read frontend settings,
including AFC corrected frequency.
Diffs for DVB driver, patch version 6.
This is what I used with the DVB driver HEAD revision
(2003-03-11 and on). This was committed to DVB HEAD on 2003-05-13.