tvpvrd stands for TV Personal Video Recorder Daemon and it’s an open source software project that has been designed to act as a daemon running on Linux/UNIX servers that makes scheduled recordings of TV broadcasts using one or more video capture cards. It also supports video transcoding via FFmpeg.

Key features include automatic client arbitration, multi-threaded and multi-process architecture, support for recording TV shows simultaneously using multiple video capture cards, support for transcoding multiple video files using user-defined profiles, automatic load balancing, password protected login (optional), transcoding queue management, as well as an efficient command language to schedule and manipulate recordings.

Among other highlights, we can mention easy-to-use support for recurring recordings, which can be set daily, weekly or monthly, complete support for UTF-8 character encodings, support for large files over 2GB, self contained XML based recording database, an efficient TCP/IP port command-line interface that has a small footprint, and support for waking up or power off the server using BIOS Real Time Clock.

The software offers comprehensive statistics, logging and detailed information about recordings, allows the user to configure it as slave or master for distributed transcoding, a built-in minimalistic web server that provides easy browser access, support for recording TV broadcasts from all available input sources, skinnable web-based interface that can be accessed from mobile devices, e-mail notification and a power daemon to manage the power on and power off functions.

tvpvrd is a simple script written in the C programming language and designed to work on almost any GNU/Linux distribution. Besides the universal source archive, which can be used to install the application on any distro, the developer offers pre-built packages for several Ubuntu and openSUSE distributions. Both 32-bit and 64-bit architectures are supported at this time.