[mythtv-users] DVR Capability

[Daniel Kristjansson]

On Fri, 2008-08-22 at 13:42 -0400, Thom Paine wrote:
> I work at our local police service and our station was hit with
> lightning last week. It knocked out alot of our equipment including
> our DVR for the interview room.
> 
> I was thinking of building a mythbox that will allow me to record from
> a video camera.
> 
> One feature myth has is the integrated burn to dvd function. That is a
> nice feature.
> 
> Has anyone else attempted something like this before?
> 
> All I need to be able to do is create a manual recording with a time
> and date stamp, from a video source such as composite in, which I
> think I can do from a PVR 250 card.
> 
> I only need to be able to record this input, and then I would be able
> to sort it by time and date. Then I could pick an interview and record
> it to dvd with mythburn.

While I'm all for using MythTV for things it wasn't written for, but
it is particularly bad at manual recordings. You want something that
has a start & stop button along with easy annotations of each video
file. Plus you probably only want the officer + assigned DA to have
access to the recording unless some "unusual access procedure" is
followed, both to preserve the privacy of witnesses and to avoid any
tampering with the evidence.

You could use MythTV, but it would need to be patched and it's a bit
of a square peg for this application. Honestly a camcorder with remote
control and timecode that records directly to DVD might be the right
tool for this job, then you only need to maintain physical security and
annotations can be written directly on the disk with a felt tip marker.
A central DVD copier could be used by the detective to make a copy
for the district attorney and defence attorney. Someone can be assigned
the task of resyncing the camcorder's internal clock once a week.

-- Daniel