On Thu, Mar 27, 2008 at 11:08 AM, Leo Mauler [email protected] wrote:

A friend of mine recently upgraded her TV tuner, and gave me her two older TV Tuners. Her oldest TV Tuner was one of the Hauppauge WinTV models which came with an FM Tuner. I was wondering if anyone has seen a "Radio VCR" project for Linux using an internal FM Tuner card.

I am excited about the prospect of being able to schedule radio recordings, especially as an FM Tuner should surely be able to be changed internally to record from different stations automatically. I've done some scheduled recordings before but it was always through Line-In and an external radio set to one station only. I'd like to be able to set up a system to record different radio shows off different radio stations, much like a VCR can record off several different TV stations. I was especially interested in the use of the "btaudio" driver to permit sound coming into the TV/FM Tuner Card to be transmitted directly over the PCI bus, instead of having to run it through the Line-In on the sound card.

The card is fully supported under Linux, FM Tuner included, but all the Linux radio projects I've found through LinuxTV.org seem to be "listening-only", as opposed to a "Radio VCR".

http://linuxtv.org/v4lwiki/index.php/Radio_Listening_Applications

(TinyURL: http://tinyurl.com/yp5dwj)

Gnomeradio has the option of recording, but you have to be there to push the "Record" button, and still there to shut off the recording, making it rather useless.

http://www.wh-hms.uni-ulm.de/~mfcn/gnomeradio/

I've found an old "Linux Gazette" article from 2003, which used ecasound, lame, and cron to schedule radio programming, but his equipment choice was an external programmable USB radio, as opposed to an internal FM Tuner.

http://linuxgazette.net/issue94/yan-fa.html

Ok- comment on what may be trivial or not depending on the how. My understanding of Open Source GUI is that WE can access a "button push" event by scripting. OR perhaps the control vectors of LIRC:

http://www.lirc.org/

and a programmable timed remote?

Or timed keyboard macros as the list of keyboard shortcuts at:

http://www.wh-hms.uni-ulm.de/~mfcn/gnomeradio/

indicates the needed commands are shortcut accessible.

Reviewing the "so far listed" we could either:

Have one of our GTK experts add timer scripting.

Use LIRC and whatever IR source to supply timed control.

Some Keyboard Script-Fu and a timed event trigger.

The seeming repetition is to show that presentation of a concept can affect how we comprehend it's application.

Me, I would give most consideration to the LIRC concept. Adding full duplex IR I/O perhaps IRDAC compatibile too could only enhance our daily uses.

The RCA IR extenders are chainable and room covering all at once. So we gain control of everything IR having line of sight to either our IR bug or the repeater chain.Which turns our universal remote already next to us into a radio controller. and perhaps we'd use it to control the computer too.

"Where else but KCLUG can we go from Linux control of a FM radio card to whole home IR in the same thread?"