But first, I would like to mention that for past 1 month Google has been time and again redirecting me here for solutions. You people rock. So I finally decided to join.

Well I do have difficult problem in here. First I must mention this not exactly a programming question but I am sensing that we may need to do some shell scripting though.

The problem is I am trying to capture from my tv tuner card which I have managed to do, and now I can also record them too, but I was not able to do both of them together as all the softwares which I tried, opened the device (/dev/video0) in blocking mode. Anyway I figured out a solution. I was able to capture from mencoder and write to a file, and at the same time I was able to read that using mplayer and it worked. What's more I could now pause or seek inside live shows

But now my hard disk keeps filling up. to manage that I need to restart mencoder but then mplayer too (who if it were lagging behind) would jump to current time. So is there a way I could restrict the file size? Or I actually just want these features no matter how. u have any suggestions. I found fftv a little promising but it won't compile.

The set of things I need is the capability to time shift, start and stop recording to file anytime without interruption in playback via a remote computer (I will try to stream the video and will probably use web-based control to control the channel changing). Can u suggest a set of tools and glue to pull this thing together Or just a beautiful software. I have tried MythTV (its too slow and heavy and feels irritatingly buggy). I have also tried Freevo but it doesn't work too good. Tried another one (forgot the name) it simply won't let me choose the frequency I want to watch. Our cable frequency table follows no standards like us-cable, japan-cable etc.