[vdr] Re: STB VDR

[Marc Haisenko <marc.haisenko@software-for-people.com>]

On Thursday 18 April 2002 18:22, you wrote:
> Marc Haisenko wrote:
>  > -fan-less, the only thing you hear is the HDD :-)
>
> www.quietpc.com, they sell 'envelopes' for HDDs, I have three of them
> and they work very well for the rotational noise.
>
>  > -remote control commands are received as normal keyboard key-presses,
>
> making
>
>  > them trvial to catch and parse
>  > -MPEG2 hardware en-/decoding
>  > -one SCART input and one SCART output
>  > -S-Video output (better quality than SCART)
>
> how can this be possible?
>
>
> ciao
> as

It's a set-top box, it's an embedded device that is targeted to be in your 
living room, connected to your TV set. It has a cool extra chip on the 
mainboard: the Sigma EM8400 for MPEG2 en-/decoding (we're not entirely sure 
about encoding yet, but their graphs that came with the docs suggest that; 
have to check their sources though), which is also responsible for converting 
the VGA signal to a PAL signal. It supports both PAL (up to 720x576 at 25fps) 
and NTSC (up to 720x480 at 30fps). We are using these boxes to produce a 
multimedia set-top box (simply for playing MPEG1/2 videos, MP3 and displaying 
pictures which all are on your PC, thus the box is userfriendly prolongation 
for you PC to the TV set) for Vobis which will be in Vobis stores in 
September (I think).

BTW: We found out that even with PAL, S-Video has a much better quality than 
SCART is able to offer :-) I don't know enough technical details to say why 
this the case.

C'ya,
	Marc


-- 
Marc Haisenko
Development
Software for People AG
Münchner Str. 45
Germany - 82131 Gauting
mailto: marc.haisenko@software-for-people.com
mailto: axl@cu-muc.de