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About JTVD
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JTVD is an attempt to make recording from TV/VCR to DVD on Linux a little bit more comfortable.
The idea of making this tool was born when my girlfriend became annoyed by wasting
time of her french lessons on searching video material, that she wanted to show to
her classes, on VHS video tapes. So we decided to put everything on DVD and I thought
it could be fun to try to make a tool that allows to do just that.
This project should not be taken too serious. It's work in progress and somewhat experimental.
But anyway, maybe it's useful for somebody else, like it is for us, that's why I put it here
on my website.
JTVD is licensed under the GNU General Public License.
If you have a suggestion or found a bug, please let me know.
Also have a look at DVDAuthor's
website for links to some promising projects dedicated to DVD authoring.
And as well have a look at Varsha
- a graphical DVD authoring tool for Linux - written in Java :-)
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News
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Discontinuation
I have decided to discontinue this project. There are many reasons for this:
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I never spent much thought on design questions, so the code has become
quite a mess. I learned a lot in the meantime and now I have come to
the point where I feel like starting over from scratch. But I don't
see a point in that, for some of the reasons below.
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JTVD doesn't seem to work well with other TV cards than bt8x8 based cards,
which is due to a major design bug. Its dependency on many external
programs, of which some of them many people find tricky to get installed,
make it a tedious task to install JTVD and get it to work.
Additionally, the Java Media Framework seems to be discontinued by Sun
Microsystems.
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The contradiction between Java being a multiplatform technology and
JTVD only working on Linux bothers me
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There are for sure many programs out there that can do everything better
than JTVD. I however would never use anything else! ;-)
Anyway, this was a lot of fun, I think I learned something and of course
it was nice to receive quite some positive feedback. Thanks for that!
Version 0.4.3 - 2005-08-22 (Another very small maintenance release):
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Fixed handling of the fine frequency and saving of modified stations
(thanks for reporting this)
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Added options to only create the DVD image without burning it and
to burn an existing Video DVD image
Version 0.4.2 - 2005-06-05:
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Some small bugfixes and improvements
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Added German translation
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Added "DV" and "FMP4" workarounds (see issues 10 and 11 in the
manual)
And again: Thanks a lot for the nice and constructive feedback!
Version 0.4.1 - 2005-02-19:
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A problem with special characters being wrongly displayed in the "Messages" tab has been fixed
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The "Speed" and "Overburn" options have been fixed
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It is now possible to specify an ALSA hardware id instead of an OSS device file.
This is useful if ALSA is installed without OSS compatibility
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The tables can now be sorted by clicking on the column headers
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JTVD now remembers its settings. It is also possible to save/load the settings to/from a file
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A small section describing known issues has been added to the manual
Many thanks for the positive and useful feedback that I have received! :-)
Version 0.4.0 - 2004-12-19:
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Added the possibility to create simple title menus in a comfortable way.
A plain color or an image can be set as background, menu buttons and text with
individual font and color settings can be added to the menu as well as sound from
a WAV file.
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Some minor improvements
Version 0.3.3 - 2004-10-30:
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Added a little TV screen making it easy to set up and browse TV stations and to find the right
moment to start grabbing. Unfortunately, it has two annoying limitations: It can only be used
with v4l2, and it has to be paused during grabbing.
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Added a scheduler that allows to set up one or more timed recording tasks
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All lists now allow multiple selections
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Some small improvements and bugfixes
2004-10-24: Important note on OpenDML AVI
Transcode (avilib) has problems with OpenDML AVI's created by mencoder. Therefore, the length of
the videos displayed in JTVD is shorter as it actually is and the files are incompletely encoded.
A patch that solves this problem has been applied to transcode's source at the end of
September, see this post:
http://itdp.fh-biergarten.de/~itdp/html/transcode-devel/2004-09/msg00356.html
To avoid this issue, either update transcode to the newest version from CVS, or uncheck the
option "OpenDML AVI (>1GB)". According to my experience, the size of the AVI files can then
still be up to 2GB.
A very small Mini-HOWTO on installing transcode from CVS can be found
here
If updating transcode is not an option, a solution for existing files could be to recreate
the index:
mencoder -forceidx -noodml input.avi -ovc copy -oac copy -o output.avi
I'm sorry I haven't noticed this issue earlier.
Older News
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Features
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This is what JTVD can do so far:
- Watch TV :-)
- Grab from the TV card to AVI files
- Schedule one or more recording tasks
- Encode video files to "DVD compatible" MPEG2 program streams
- Basic DVD authoring incl. creation of simple title menus
- Create the DVD image and burn it
- Burn an existing Video DVD image
This is what it currently can't do:
- Copy DVD's (currently not planned)
- ...
Currently open issues:
- Possible to grab directly to DVD compatible MPEG2?
- Possible to implement a "live preview" of the video currently being grabbed?
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Requirements
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JTVD is just a graphical frontend. The actual work is done by the great commandline programs listed below.
The version numbers in parentheses denote the versions of the programs that I have tested JTVD with,
therefore I recommend to use these or newer versions if possible.
Besides that JTVD requires a Java Runtime, at least 1.4.x. I recommend the newest 1.5.x because of
faster startup, the better GTK+ Look and Feel, the nice new default theme called "Ocean" and support
for truetype fonts that doesn't seem to be available with 1.4.x.
Optional: Java Media Framework API (JMF), for the TV screen
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Installation/Configuration
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Download
jtvd-0.4.3.tar.gz
to for example /opt or wherever you want and unpack it:
tar xvfz jtvd-0.4.3.tar.gz.
This will create a subdirectory jtvd containing the extracted files.
If you want to use the TV screen, you need to install JMF. For more information, please see
here
If JAVA_HOME and JMFHOME are not already set up in your profile or if you want to override the
settings of your profile, you can set both variables in the startup script /opt/jtvd/jtvd.
There are two ways to start JTVD:
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Using the startup script (recommended):
/opt/jtvd/jtvd
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Manually (assuming JMF is installed in /usr/lib):
cd /opt/jtvd
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:/opt/jtvd:/usr/lib/JMF-2.1.1e/lib
java -cp .:/usr/lib/JMF-2.1.1e/lib/jmf.jar net/luniks/jtvd/JTVD
Problems that might occur:
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"
java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError: no jv4linfo in java.library.path":
The runtime could not find the shared library libjv4linfo.so,
most likely because the LD_LIBRARY_PATH is not (correctly) set.
The script jtvd should take care of this.
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Message "Java Media Framework not found" in the TV screen:
If you don't have JMF installed and you don't want to use the TV screen, please ignore this
message, JTVD of course also works without the TV screen. Otherwise, please make sure you have
JMFHOME set correctly, either in your profile or in JTVD's startup script jtvd.
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Message "Error setting up the player. Please check the messages" in the TV screen:
Probably not enough permissions on the video device file. It could also mean mean that the
LD_LIBRARY_PATH is not set correctly, but this shouldn't happen when the startup script
jtvd is used.
The Manual
contains a small section about know issues.
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Documentation
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Manual
Javadoc
How to build JTVD from the source JAR
Requirements:
Build JTVD:
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Download the
source JAR
- Unpack the JAR:
jar xvf jtvd-0.4.3-src.jar
- Change to the source dir:
cd jtvd/src/
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Make sure that the paths to the Java include files (property
"java.include")
and to jmf.jar (property "jmf.jar") in build.xml are correct
- Simply run
ant without any arguments
- Check the output for errors
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If build was successful go one dir up:
cd ../
This directory should contain the binary distribution
jtvd-0.4.3.tar.gz
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Download
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Binary:
jtvd-0.4.3.tar.gz
Source:
jtvd-0.4.3-src.jar
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Screenshots
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Grab
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Encode
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Author + Burn
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Title Menu
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Messages
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