This guide may also applicable to other brands of PVRs that produce a similar standard program stream.

Step 1: Tranfering files from Topfield PVR to PC

Topfield PVR of this model range offer a USB connection for file uploads and downloads. The PVR however is not recognised as an external USB media by Windows or Linux systems, so you will need to use a special tool to transfer the files.

Windows: You need device drivers and Altair file transfer software, both provided by Topfield. Plug your Topfield to your PC, and point Windows to the directory where you have the Topfield drivers downloaded and extracted. Start Altair to transfer files.

Linux (recommended): An open-source alternative to Altair is Guppy. No drivers are needed and everything works out of the box (tested with Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala). In my experience the Guppy is more usable and more reliable than the Windows alternative.

On both platforms the transfer speeds are equally slow. On Guppy and Altair you have Turbo Mode which improves the transfer speed, but disables other PVR functionality at the same time (recordings, remote control). Keep in mind that transfers can take hours, so make sure you don’t miss any recordings due to file transfers running in Turbo Mode.

Step 2: Converting the .REC files to DVD format (several alternatives)

The .REC files as such usually appear unrecognised by operating systems, but luckily they are rather standard program streams which most many video applications accept as such. You can play the files directly by using the VLC player (Linux and Windows).

Step 2.1: Fast and easy conversion using ConvertXtoDVD (Windows and Linux)

ConvertXtoDVD is a high quality video-to-DVD conversion software which supports just about any input file format on the Windows platform.

1. Download and install the ConvertXtoDVD by VSO Software.
2. ConvertXtoDVD accepts .REC files as such, and automatically converts and burns them to DVDs. The process is very simple, fast, and almost completely automated. In program settings you can apply 2-pass encoding (since v4 and newer) to optimise quality, sacrificing speed.

• Pros: Very easy and quick process. Idiot proof results
• Cons: ConvertXtoDVD always performs full re-encode of the material which may have an impact on quality. ConvertXtoDVD is shareware, but well worth the investment if you do a lot of video conversions.
• Linux: ConvertXtoDVD is a Windows program, but is usable with Wine emulator under Linux

Step 2.2: Fast and easy conversion using DeVeDe (Linux and Windows)

DeVeDe is an open-source video-to-dvd conversion software for Linux, but a Windows port of the application also exists (not tested for this guide).

1. Download and install the DeVeDe by Rastersoft
2. DeVeDe supports .REC files as such and automatically converts and burns them to DVDs. The process is rather simple and somewhat automated. In settings you can apply 2-pass encoding (v3.16 and newer) to optimize quality, sacrificing speed.

• Pros: Free and open-sourced solution. Quite simple to use.
• Cons: DeVeDe loses to CovertXtoDVD in all aspects: Quality, speed, and ease of use. DeVeDe seems to have problems hitting the DVD-R target size (4.4GB) accurately – the end results are sometimes too large (not possible to burn on DVD-R), and sometimes too small (sub-optimal quality). You can work this around by adjusting the file size slider bar on DeVeDe UI, but then you need to perform the conversion again, taking a lot of time. DeVeDe always performs a full re-encode of the material which may have an impact on the quality
• Windows: A Windows port of the application is availble, but we have not tested it so no guarantees.

Step 2.3: Conversion using ProjectX and AVStoDVD for optimal quality (Windows)

The ProjectX is a free multi-platform tool for demultiplexing the .REC streams into audio, video and subtitle files. AVStoDVD is a freeware Windows application for converting video files to the DVD format. It offers more flexibility in settings and provides best results using HC Encoder, or by skipping the re-encode process if not required (multiplex compliant files straight to DVD format)

1. Download and install ProjectX and AVStoDVD
2. Start ProjectX, open the .REC file and hit QuickStart to demux the program stream into video, audio and subtitle streams (if any).
3. Start AVStoDVD and add the *.m2v file created by ProjectX. The application will notify you of audio stream(s) of matching file name, and add that to the project as well.
4. There are couple of settings to take care of before launching the conversion process
   1. In the audio stream properties, tick Keep DVD compliant files. There is no need to re-encode the audio as the DVB broadcasting audio should already be suitable for DVD usage as such (at least in my home TV network).
   2. In video stream properties, tick Keep DVD compliant files only if your audio and video streams combined would fit the 4.4GB DVD-R capacity (or 8.5GB if you are using dual layer). If your files are larger, then this box must be un-ticked as the files need to be re-encoded to achieve a smaller file size. In encoder settings, choose HC Encoder (should be the default choice).
   3. With these settings in place, you should be ready to start the conversion. Review your settings in the presented dialogue before conversion starts. You can output to .ISO DVD image file, burn directly or choose a DVD folder structure to burn the video DVD manually.

• Pros: No quality loss whatsoever if no re-encoding takes place. AVStoDVD uses the HC Encoder which provides the highest video quality conversion. A free and partially open-sourced solution.
• Cons: Added complexity to the process, in comparison to the two other alternatives. More chances to make an error in configuring the settings
• Linux: ProjectX is available for Linux but AVStoDVD is not. AVStoDVD does not run under Wine (at least not without special configurations?), so in order to use it on the Linux platform you’ll need a Windows installed on VirtualBox or VMWare.

Conclusions

Conversion from Topfield .REC files to a DVD is more complex process than one might think. Plenty of transformations stages take place in the process, but luckily ConvertXtoDVD and DeVeDe have these nicely automated. The Step 2.3 is recommended for the more advanced users and quality enthusiasts, which have Windows operating system available. Step 2.1 using ConvertXtoDVD is the best choice for the average user, as the overall results are the best of the pack: It provides ease of use, speed and decent results with minimal effort.

Unfortunately a MKV to AVCHD conversion solution that would be as good as mkv2vob does not currently exist for the Linux operating system. But luckily you can run the very same mkv2vob on your Linux operating system, using the Wine Windows emulator. The installation process however includes one trick, as mkv2vob does not work on Wine straight out of the box. Read on to see how it’s done.

This guide is made with Ubuntu Linux 9.10 (Karmic Koala), but the guide is pretty much universal with perhaps minor adjustments.

1. Install latest Wine. You can find this in Ubuntu Software Center, or the package manager of your Linux distribution. Personally I like Wine Doors, which installs Wine and a software management solution to install a number of popular Windows applications.
2. Fetch winetricks script. Winetricks is needed for installing some additional Windows libraries, in order to make mkv2vob to work. Open console and type: wget http://www.kegel.com/wine/winetricks
3. Use winetricks to download needed Windows libraries. In console: sh winetricks vb6run wsh56
4. Download the latest mkv2vob and open the installer file using Wine. Click here for the download

And you are done!

Next step is to configure and use mkv2vob for the AVCHD conversion. Check out our mkv2vob related AVCHD guides for guidance. Check out the screenshot of mkv2vob running on Ubuntu Linux – the picture also shows the correct settings for converting MKV files with subtitles to USB AVCHD format to be used in PS3.

The PCLinuxOS is an interesting story altogether. The Mandriva forked distribution came up with a excellent out-of-the-box experience few years back, and started gaining a notable hype even in it’s preview versions. The final stable release 2007 really hit the jackpot being the most desktop ready and “Windows user friendly” Linux distribution at the time. In 2008 they released equally excellent 2008 MiniMe edition of the operating system, but then things started going rapidly downhill. Updates were less frequent, no new major stable release was achieved, main developer was off duty for quite some time, and all kinds of personal drama was stirring in the community. The 2009.1 release was more like a “2007.1″ release and didn’t impress anyone. Personally I was more than ready to dumb PCLinuxOS to the distro grave yard. But then came the 2009.2 with an announcement that it was in fact a quarterly update. Would a solid release schedule be able to blow some fresh air into the once great distribution?

What sets PCLinuxOS apart from Ubuntu and others is still the choice of not to include the very latest versions of certain core components. The desktp enviroment is the classic KDE 3.5.10, the Linux kernel is at 2.6.26.8, and the Xorg the 1.4. Key applications are however quite well updated to recent, or at least quite recent versions.

The resulting user experience is quite interesting – the system is very responsive, performance is good, and user experience out-of-the-box is damn near perfect. My basic installation consumed about 30% less memory than a similar configuration with Ubuntu 9.04 (180MB vs 120MB footprint)Using KDE3.5 makes you wonder once again that what the hell were the KDE4 devs thinking. All this comes wrapped in a rather pleasing blue theme and everything nice configured and ready for daily use. And if you don’t everything to be ready for you and you want to build your desktop from ground up, there is a new 2009 MiniMe edition available as well.

But there are also few areas where PCLOS should improve in the near future. First of all is the installation procedure which starts with a rather unique step 1 – the un-installation of video drivers, which could be confusing for a first time Linux user. The K-menu structure should also be reconsidered, as it contains sub-levels that do nothing but add complexity to the hierarchy. Some file associations did not seem to be in place in Firefox, which was an immediate annoyance. And I also found a bug that sometimes pressing a key on my Thinkpad T41 resulted about 10 key presses on the application. This was a rare issue but I have never seem anything like it on any other distro.

While PCLOS still is very similar than it was back in 2007 and it doesn’t have the bleeding edge core components, it still has the potential to be a very good Linux desktop environment for new Linux users and especially if your hardware is slightly aged. What the project now needs to do is to rebuild the confidence by showing that they can provide a steady flow of updates to the repositories and that they can stick to their new quarterly schedule, while focusing on quality control and implementation. It will be interesting to see how the year goes for them, and I certainly wish them all the best.

Grap your copy at http://www.pclinuxos.com

Download now!

The initial impression of Fedora is very good – the new Plymouth boot scheme loads the system up very quickly, and without any flickering or unnecessary ‘geek talk’ shown on the screen. Instead there is a simplistic animation of the Fedora logo which greets you prior to the login screen – this gives a nice touch to the distribution. The post-boot visuals are not bad either, and Fedora comes with a pleasant dark blue tone and is one of the better looking desktops on the Linux market.

As the headline suggests,  Fedora comes with the very latest stuff that the world of free software has to offer. But unfortunately the edge leaves the distro bleeding on the release date. The included Firefox version is 3.5 beta 4, which means that a number of Firefox add-ons will not work on day 1, until the Firefox 3.5 is out and add-ons updated. Also the configuration of the browser leaves a bit to be desired, as it doesn’t have clue what to do with many common file formats, such as .PDF files as an example. Hell, even the “Open containing folder”-feature in the Firefox download manager asks for the associated helper application.

Fedora is also one of the more strict distributions regarding the licensing of the software components. This means that no support for proprietary formats (such as the MP3) is included, and neither is Adobe Flash for the browser. The former disadvantage is however tackled quite nicely with the automatic codec finder that finds, downloads and installs the required software for media playback. Installing Adobe Flash on the other hand required a visit to the command line interface.

After spending a few days with the installation and configuring the system for our personal preferences we found ourselves using the command line way more than we have with Ubuntu, openSUSE and other new user oriented desktops. Luckily Fedora has some excellent documentation and communities online, which makes finding support very easy – I would say Fedora is second best in this field, only topped by Ubuntu.

So who should use Fedora? As a bleeding edge and short life cycle distribution, it is hardy the ideal server environment. It offers a very nice desktop environment, but requires a bit more manual tuning than some of the competition. Performance wise it is very typical, with similar system resource consumption that Ubuntu and others. FOSS purists will enjoy the fact that no proprietary code is included. Overall I would recommend Fedora to someone who has already learned the basics of Linux and can do a bit of work on the command line. The relation to RedHad is a terrific asset for anyone interested in learning Linux for a professional career, as RedHat / CentOS has a lot of commercial and corporate users. If you are looking for the quick jump from Windows to Linux, you should probably look elsewhere.

You can grab your copy from: fedoraproject.org

A new version of ConvertXtoDVD has been released, version 3.6.4.

Recent changes include:

• new image filter
• new translations
• new VSO updater included
• minor menu template corrections
• preparation for 2 pass encoding coming in Version 4

I started off by giving the KDE4 live CD a whirl and I was pleasantly surprised. This is the first KDE4 distro that seems somewhat usable to my eyes. The stupid desktop plasmoid was gone and the desk top arrangement look very familiar for an ex-KDE3 user. Like always with Mandriva, and unlike Ubuntu, the visual appearance is very pleasing with rather bring blue design, beatiful desktop login animations, wallpapers and so on – this is something that Mandriva has always done well. However the Kicker menu was disappointing as always:”K-K-K-K-K….” – when do the KDE developers realize that starting every application name with a “K” looks retarded and is just bad for usability?

Over to Gnome version then and I ended up also installing the desktop and cofiguring it for my daily needs. The Gnome environment is also nicely designed with pleasant theme and graphics. The default theme “La Ora” comes in many colors if the default color scheme is too bright for you. Interesting thing in comparison to Ubuntu  is that with the same basic configuration on my veteran Thinkpad T41 laptop, the Mandriva cosumes roughly 30-40 megabytes less RAM. My laptop has 1GB RAM so this usually is not a concern in web and desktop use, but this could make a difference if your PC has 512MB or less. If you want to use the ever lighter weight LXDE desktop you can do that by installing the meta-package task-lxde as using it shaves down the memory consumption further ~20 megabytes. I also tried Mandy on a Thinkpad X31 / 384MB and it was pretty responsive and perfectly usable. Besides memory footprint the overt all responsiveness is good and my subjective evaluation is that Mandriva is noticeably faster than the latest Ubuntu in desktop usage.

Mandriva also uses a 6 month release cycle so the changes in between versions are not too big. They introduced better boot speed, just like Ubuntu, and all the applications and components have been upgraded. Unlike with 2009.0 release, I did not immediately notice any serious bugs or flawed functionality. In addition to a good visual design and nice responsiveness, Mandriva also has the benefit of the Mandriv a Control Center system administration features, which would be a great addition to any distro (it’s open source, why nobody besides PCLOS is adobting it?). Mandriva traditionally has had a top notch hardware detection,  and everything was installed correctly in 2009.1 as well (Unlike Ubuntu Jaunty which installs incorrect graphics acceleration settings for old laptop ATI Radeon cards).

So if you are looking for some distro hopping I can warmly recommend to give the latest Mandriva a whirl – especially if you are looking for a KDE4 based solution, but their Gnome offer totally fine as well. You just might end up liking it.

Mandriva can be downloaded at: www.mandriva.com

The most obvious improvements in this release are the notification system (see Shuttleworth’s blog) and improved boot speed. The notifications bring new uniform notifications of various system events for the end user, such as network connections/disconnects, volume changes from hot keys and so on. I see this as an improvement in terms of usability and visual appeal. The notes itself are somewhat dark in colors, perhaps to match some of the new themes better – on the other hand they don’t quite match with the classic Human theme which still is the default. The boot process on the other hand has really become faster – I did not clock the difference, but it is very noticeable. Also I have to give credit for the new Gnome login screen which actually looks good (and also has rather dark toned colors).

Speaking of visual appearance, Since Shuttleworth’s vision to improve the looks of Ubuntu, they have been releasing some darker themes. The Ibex introduced theme ‘Dark room’, and the Jaunty comes with ‘New wave’ and ‘Dust’ themes. Event though I have always hated the bizarre brown/orange theme of Ubuntu, I have to say that these new additions don’t really improve things. I don’t know what is it, but somehow they don’t feel complete or polished enough – the final touch is missing. And I also don’t understand that whats the obsession with rather dark color schemes? The new wallpaper, even though it should matter as it is easily changed, deserves a special recognition: It is the lamest Ubuntu wallpaper in a while. I quite liked the more artistic approach of Ibex’s or Hardy’s wallpaper, but this new one goes back to the Ubuntu tradition of delivering some kind of lame, meaningless, brown stripes on screen. Why is it so difficult for Ubuntu to make a polished looking release? The first impression is everything in attracting new Linux users.

However thing that most concerns me about this new release is that it seems to be contain some rather big showstopper grade bugs. My Thinkpad T41 using Jaunty acts very slow and the screen redraws seem to bring CPU load to 100%, making the whole system rather painful to use. Overall your mileage depends on your hardware, but I always find it surprising when some distro doesn’t correctly on this oldish laptop – that is because generally the Thinkpad’s are possibly the best supported laptops for Linux, and on the other hand this laptop has flawlessy worked on a HUGE number of distributions (for exp. all Ubuntu’s starting from Feisty), so it is always interesting when someone still manages to break the compatibility with this hardware. The CPU usage bug is reported by many, there seem to be a lot of problems with WLAN/WPA2 and more…you can track the bug squashing work by having a look at Launchpad.

Overall it is a typical Ubuntu release. Brings something new, but nothing ground breaking and is very similar to the previous relese. In this release the changes are perhaps more apparent than in the previous two (Hardy, Ibex).  The maturity to my eyes doesn’t seem as good as it was with the Ibex on day 1, so I would give it a few weeks to improve until installing or upgrading. I really don’t see why they stick with the 6 month release cycle as it obviously is too short to introduce anything significantly new, or to stabilize software. I find it somewhat paradoxical that actually the previous release Intrepid Ibex is now in it’s prime. But give Jaunty a month or two, and the huge  user base of Ubuntu will guarantee that the most common bugs are found and fixed, and Jaunty evolves into a nice stable release – just before Karmic Koala hits the servers…

If you can’t wait, you can grap it from Ubuntu.com

Comodo is actually quite famous for their excellent free firewall software. Especially power users will enjoy it’s configurability and options, which all are nicely laid out on a well designed GUI. It is also pretty well pre-configured as it recognizes the most common Internet applications (most browsers, instant messengers…) and categorizes them as safe application, thus not alerting the user. In case of an unknown application attempting to connect an alert is show. Interesting addition in the latest version is ThreatCast database, where Comodo  collects user’s responses to firewall alerts and aims to classify more files based on that – as we see in the screenshot, the FileZilla FTP client however was still unknown to the system (which is somewhat surprising?).

Comodos’s suite also has so called proactive defence features, branded as DEFENCE+. This is basically application behaviour blocking and authorization – the fireall will alert users on various application behaviour events. For an example application installations or application attempting to modify or launch another will cause a DEFENCE+ alert. Personally I find this kind of protection somewhat intrusive, and I doubt that it is very good for inexperienced PC users either, since the user has to have some knowledge whether an application should be allowed to do it’s thing or not. Anyway, the feature is there if you want it – I dont.

Conclusive anti-virus tests are impossible to conduct without a sufficient virus database and fortunately my PC is clean, so this part of the software suite is more difficult to evaluate. The good news is that Comodo’s real-time scanner doesn’t seem to be resource hog. I would guess it would fall to the similar category of Avast!, but this is purely subjective evaluation. I also tried the latest AVG recently, and it seemed to drag down the system much more than these two. What I would like to see is more options for the real-time scanner – personally I like to limit scanning to file system write operations only for improved file read and execution performance. Why? Well, a first thing a virus will try to do is to replicate and infect files, which is a write operation. This is of course somewhat less secure, at least theoretically, but it will improve the performance, but as said such options are not available.

I Googled around for anti-virus software benchmarks, but it seems that not too many conclusive ones are performed on Comodo. This report published by VirusInfo suggests that Comodo’s detection rate is somewhat mediocre. It is well below the best performers, but delivers similar detection rates than Sophos, Trend Micro or McAfee. Personally I don’t see this is as a huge concern. The virus database seems to receive updates almost daily and these days information of major virus infection outbreaks is so rapidly distributed on the Internet that I have little doubt that Comodo wouldn’t update their database rapidly if such event occurs.

Overall I am very pleased with Comodo. It delivers an excellent firewall and a decent anti-virus in one integrated package and does it without destroying computer’s performance – and it’s free. If you want to play it extra safe you could just use their firewall-only solution and combining it with Avast!, which seems to deliver a bit higher detection rates, but then you would lose the benefits of an intergated solution. At least be sure to check out COMODO’s offer before going shopping on the security market.

Download Comodo Internet Security: CLICK HERE

• Antivirus – powerful protection against infection
• Firewall – enterprise class protection against internet attacks
• Defense + Host Intrusion Prevention System

Author: Comodo Holdings BVI
License: Freeware
Download: http://personalfirewall.comodo.com