[linux-dvb] Re: DivX player for DVB system?

[Henning Holtschneider <hh@holtschneider.com>]

> But as far as I read it here, the DVB-s hardware is not fast enough to
> play a "I-frames only stream" at 25 fps.

Yes, that's right. I talked to the guys from ffmpeg and MPlayer 
(http://ffmpeg.sourceforge.net, http://mplayer.sourceforge.net) and they 
told me that the best solution would be to convert the DivX stream to MPEG-
2 I- and P-frames because some motion vectors (?) from DivX can be used. I-
frame only MPEG-2 would run at up to 20 MB/s which doesn't work with the 
DVB card.

Even with a lot of optimizations, doing this conversion in real-time would 
require a stronger CPU than the one I have in my VDR machine (PII/333). So, 
I'm now trying to convert DivX to MPEG using ffmpeg "offline". There is 
preliminary support for the motion vector conversion described above so the 
bitrate won't be too high and the output file doesn't get too big. So far, 
I have managed to get a moving picture from a converted DivX file but no 
sound. ffmpeg is advancing quickly, so these problems will hopefully be 
fixed soon. ffmpeg would probably even allow me to decode the DivX file on 
a faster machine and stream it in real-time over the network to my DVB 
card ;-)

Another option that I have been thinking about for a while is using a VGA 
card with TV-out and the Linux framebuffer driver. Does anyone have 
experience with Matrox cards (they seem to be supported best by the 
framebuffer driver)? What about the image quality? I currently have an ATI 
card but the framebuffer driver won't run below 59.9 Hz refresh rate when 
the card is connected to my TV and the image quality is awful (yes, I know 
that 640x480 will never look as sharp on a TV 352x288 TV screen as it 
should).

Regards,
hh



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