PVR stuff

Bits and pieces related to PVRs and the av files produced by the Mediastar 920, manufactured by Arion (Korea)

An incomplete description of the formats of the .AVR and .AVF files that are written by the PVRs
Two perl scripts (in a zip file) that read the avf and avr files and print out bits of information.
Beta versions of ProjectX installations that can create Mediastar/Arion format TS files, see below for details. These are binary installation folders for Windows b26 snapshot version , (latest, but not based on a stable released version of code) older version from February 2007, for those who do not have ProjectX installed already. Otherwise just extract the .jar file
A Letter to Opac (Aust) with suggested enhancements to the 920's schedule list. These suggestions have made it into the Feb 2007 beta release, both in Aus and Europe. It's pleasing when vendors listen to their customers - even better when they respond. Somehow I can't see the likes of Sony or Toshiba doing this.

ProjectX

I have modified the code for version 0.90.4.00 of ProjectX to be able to output files suitable for transferring to the PVR and playing. It is currently here for testing by anyone who wants to.

Instructions:

Download the zip file and unzip into a suitable place. There is nothing else, so you should work it into wherever your current installation is - and just name the two versions differently, or else duplicate the installation and overwrite the ProjectX.jar file. The only difficulty with running in the same place is that the new option is not understood by the old version. Options are stored in a file "X.ini" in the same directory as the jar-file of ProjectX that created it.

There are two added options, both on the "special" settings page.

TS:Arion file format adaption This is to put extra intelligence into the file read routines, but it does not do much at the moment, because the standard version of ProjectX sems to read the AVR file with no significant problems anyway.
(4)add Arion Header to TS This is in the drop-down box at the bottom. It enables the extra header stuff, including creating a .AVF file when writing TS file output.

Usage:

For writing, select the "add Arion header" option and ensure you have output settings option set to split file at 2000 MB (or a smaller amount if you like for testing). Select your input files and process with the action "to TS" selected. That should give you .AVF and .AVR files ready to copy to the PVR and play.

The file names are derived from the leading parts of the input file name, suffixed with the part number and date as expected by the PVR. ProjectX uses a different naming scheme as the file is being written, but my code just renames it after it has been created.

The current state is...

Version 0.90.4.00_b26

I have produced playable TS from two sources so far.

The first file was an Mpeg2-PS file that I had produced using ProjectX on a file originally recorded on my MediaStar. It was a small file, but I had split it at 650MB just to test the multi-file capabilities. It played OK, but the fast forward and rewind was rather jerky, and much more obvious that the original (which I still had on the PVR). So there is something about the way ProjectX reconstructs TS files that is not optimum for the MediaStar player. I do not know whether there are options that could fix this, but I am not too interested in trying to fix it, since for me it would just be a lot of trial and error.

The second was a 5.5GB .rec file recorded on a Topfield 5000. So it was already TS format and it played as smoothly as a direct recording on my MediaStar both normal and fast speeds.

Split files: in both cases there was a tiny glitch when the AVR files switched from one to the next. There was perhaps half a second of audio dropped (maybe two syllables), and the video transition was sometimes undetectable. This, I presume, relates to the splitting routine that ProjectX uses. It does not cut off to the file cluster boundary that the Mediastar seems to like. I am currently undecided as to whether it is worth following up. Selecting ProjectX's standard 2000MB split value produces file parts that are just a bit smaller than the "full size" files the MediaStar produces, so that seems to be no problem.

Still not done:

I have done nothing about subtitles - I don't even know what it should look like anyway.
There is some extra diagnostic logging output, which is in hard-coded English only - I do not intend to leave this in, but error messages are also not yet done as translatable resource strings.
AC3 audio, or dual audio streams, I have not tested. I do not know if I have any, apart from some HD recordings but I cannot play those back so they are of limited use for testing.
You must remember to force the split - eventually I will enforce it in the code, but at the moment if you forget it and download a very big AVR file you might end up with an unusable hard drive. I log a warning about it, and the file name comes out wrong, but the potential is still there for now.