continuous high-fidelity video recorder for a TV Station [C# / WinForms / MySQL]
Records continuous video signal from a video card and organizes it into a predetermined user-managed directory structure by TV Show, record time, show name etc (falls back to 1-hour (intuitively named) chunks when this information is not available).
Best results were achieved with Blackmagic Design DeckLink cards, but any PCIe capture cards can be used.
Features:
- Never loses any video data that goes through the video cable
- Dedicated CaptureTestConsole app for real-time management and emergency manual intervention
- Has a admin panel to allocate, ahead of time, which time slots will be recorded to which TV shows' files – the user can specify night-time show start/end times and go to sleep.
- The admin panel can be accessed from network
- Can upload recorded files to a remote FTP server (file sizes can be huge, so the server still has to be located nearby). Since the record servers have to be located in the Master Control Room where the coax cables run (and a lot of staff can't enter), this features allows for fast and easy company-wide distribution of recent recordings, as well as enabling more straightforward off-site archiving.
- Extensive metadata about recorded content
- Multiple codec support
- AVI / FLV container format support
- ffmpeg integration
- python script to add recording dates to filenames
Not implemented yet:
- Auto-omitting TV ads – ad time on TV can be highly variable, so not even operators know when they'll start/end. Implementation would require real-time human intervention, which would defeat the whole point.
- Post-factum Breaking News separation – requires manual file editing.
CaptureTestConsole utilizes DirectX.Capture library from Brian Low