Have a beer and don't miss "Plus belle la vie"

How nerding can save your brain and help you to loose few brain cells ?

In 1998 was launched one of the best ever french TV serie, the unforgetable "Cap des pins". Unfortunately, this was stopped quickly and we, poor frenchies, had to wait until 2004 to discover "Plus belle la vie", its best sucessor.

Unfortunately it's on air every week day on France 3 TV channel at 8:20 pm which is not a reasonable time, even for a nerd stuck to his keyboard, especially when one of the several Arnaud of mine is offering a beer, "there", out in the real world.

So what, miss a beer or miss this delicious inside black hole, result of 30 minutes of brain tv wash ?

And someone invented recordings....

You need :

1. a somehow TV capable device with composite output and sound output
   
2. a video card with a composite input and sound card with line input
   
3. a physical friend and a beer waiting for you outside
4. mencoder
   

How to proceed :

A/ Create a nice script to record and encode the Tv output. It takes as input the name of output and recording duration. Mencoder is fun and uses nice parameters uh!

[barth@localhost scripts]$ cat record_tv.sh
#!/bin/sh
if test -z "$2"; then echo "usage: record_tv.sh outputfile durationinsecond"; exit; fi

#name of output
NAME=$1

#Duration in seconds
TIME=$2

#Where to put the stuff
OUTDIR="/home/barth/videos/tv_recordings/"
OUT="$OUTDIR/$NAME"

mencoder -tv norm=0:input=1:driver=v4l2 -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vbitrate=900 -oac mp3lame -lameopts cbr:br=64 -vf pp=lb -endpos $TIME -o $OUT tv:// > /dev/null

Just one comment, take car to redirect the output of mencoder to /dev/null or a file. This is necessary otherwise, the next step won't work (seems cron doesn't like verbosity)

B/ Edit your crontab to launch recording script on time and during 45 minutes (2700 seconds)

[barth@localhost scripts]$ crontab -e

=> This opens a nice vi, where we can edit le jobs to be launched!

20 20 * * * /home/barth/softwares/scripts/record_tv.sh plusbellelavie.avi 2700

Check the crontab by

[barth@localhost scripts]$ crontab -l

C/ Don't forget to set up you mixer setup

D/ Select the right TV channel on TV set and go out !