DVR-like playing while recording, how to?

[Lindsay Patten]

Looking at VLC I have to guess that it is possible to have VLC streaming video from a capture device or from over the net to a file and have another copy of VLC playing that file with the ability to pause, etc. the way that DVRs allow you to watch, pause, etc., a program you are recording.

I've looked at several other programs and they all require that you stop recording before you can view the file. Can this be done with VLC and if so what file format would one stream to in order to do this?

For what I want to do the minimum functionality would be to just have the video display be delayed by one minute from the capture, but it would be nice if one could pause, slo-mo, or rewind as well, all things VLC can do with a complete file, but with a file that is still being recorded to?

Thanks in advance for any info!

[stevedee3]

I agree. This would be a nice feature.

(My comments relate to playback from live DVB-T, but I imagine they're valid in other contexts as well.)

The current functionality that is implemented gives you:

1. Recording of what you're watching at the moment
2. Time shifting - you can pause what you're watching

The pieces that I think are missing are:

1. The ability to rewind while time shifting (at the moment the buffer gets deleted after you've viewed it)
2. The ability to save the time shift buffer for later playback
3. The ability to skip ahead when time shifting e.g. to skip advertisements

(Pause and slow-mo work while timeshifting)

Some mix if the current record and time shift functions could probably achieve this, but I don't know how difficult that would be.

VLC is so close to being usable as a PVR substitute... but it's not quite there yet.

[Lindsay Patten]

As is typical I made things more complicated than necessary, thinking too far ahead. I just tried simply opening the webcam in VLC and paused it for 10 seconds and voila, a 10 second time shift! So that already satisfies my most basic requirements!

But I'm still curious, is there a way to stream the video to the disk and then play from disk without waiting for the recording to finish? It would seem that if you were reading from the disk then you should be able to get the rest of the pvr functionality.

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

You should try 1.0.0-rc3

[stevedee3]

You should try 1.0.0-rc3

Are there specific new features or bug fixes you would like us to test in 1.0.0-rc3, Jean-Baptiste?

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

You should try 1.0.0-rc3

Are there specific new features or bug fixes you would like us to test in 1.0.0-rc3, Jean-Baptiste?

Well, not really, I just want it to be quite tested and stable.

It seems to be globally better than all 0.9x releases, so far, but I want people to check.
And most of the devs are already focused on 1.1.