[vdr] Re: Question About recording?

["Rene Bartsch" <vdr@bartschnet.de>]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Dylan D" <maxattack@optushome.com.au>
To: <vdr@linuxtv.org>
Sent: Wednesday, September 18, 2002 1:16 AM
Subject: [vdr] Re: Question About recording?


> No thats not true totally... The card is Linux supported and someone on
> "dvb linux list" is working on implementing drivers for the vdr as we
> speak.
>
> Quote "They sent me the required documentation and a PCMCIA module,
> unfortunally I'm still waiting for the seperate tuner box. I hope to
> receive this soon so that I can test the written code and continue to
> write the driver
> Holger"
>

Fine!

>
>
> But your answer really didnt answer my question. Why do u need/want more
> then 1 card is the second card used for recording other shows while u
> watch another ??. Do all these cards require a mpeg decoder or can i use
> a mpeg  decoder card ? does the second card only used for recording
> require any nice features as it is just recording..
>
> What are some required specs on a dvb card required for vdr as there are
> many different cards with many different features.?

For recording you only need DVB-cards supported by the Convergence-driver.
This can be low-budgets (no MPEG-decoder) or full-featured ones
(with MPEG-decoder). Low-budgets have the advantage of providing the
complete TS. So you can filter the streams you want by your software (e.g.
VDR).
VDR-1.1.x supports TS, which means you can record all channels
of a transponder at the same time.

Full-featured cards don't provide a TS, but use their ARM and firmware
to provide a limited number of pre-filtered AV_PES/PES/PS-streams
from the TS-stream.

VDR originally was developed to work with one full-featured DVB-card only.
Because of that VDR can only use full-featured cards for A/V-output and OSD.

The new 1.1.x-branch of VDR has an API-structure.
This makes it possible to use different I/O-hardware.
Currently there are people developing an output-plugin for DXR3-cards.

This means you currently need one full-featured card to watch and the others
can be
low-budgets. I hope there will be output-plugins for XFree/Framebuffer and
ALSA/OSS in the future. Then it would be possible to use low-budgets only.

Rene