[vdr] OT: a rant regarding DVB-C cards

["Juha Pahkala" <juhis@postmaster.co.uk>]

Hello everybody,

Ok, this evidently ended up as beeing a long rant, and since I'm basically just trying to pick up the correct dvb card at this stage, some of you might consider this as beeing OT. Nevertheless, below considerations raise many questions that i'd like to get aswerd so bear with me, and thanks in advance for any help I may get.

I've been meaning to build a VDR box for the past couple of months. What's kept me from building one is the fact that i haven't been able to chooose a DVB-C card to buy. There are quite a few questions that I have after reading linux-dvb and vdr mailing lists. The first question that I've been wondering is whether to buy a full featured card or a budget one.

The problem I see with full featured cards is the fact that using them you can only output mpeg streams and osd stuff to the television. I do know that lots of different plugins exsist to do various things in the OSD but I really would like to be able to for example play 3d games with the same machine that is connected to the TV. The cpu requierment to do mpeg2 decoding in software is the common argument I've seen against a setup I've just proposed. But if I'm not mistaken, it's still less than transcoding a mpeg4 stream to mpeg1 and feeding it to the full featured card in order to play mpeg4 movies on the machine, which I intend to do anyhow, so some cpu power is needed nevertheless.

I still think I'll buy a full featured card for now (I think I'll end up buying more than one card anyway) since you can't really use VDR with a budget card + videocard combination [1],[2] at the moment. Please somebody prove me wrong here. One thing I'd like to know is whether I'll be able to use only the tuner part of a full featured card in the future, if at some point it'll be feasible to use a videocard to output to TV. 

Some questions regarding full featured cards. As I understand, there are basically two supported cards in the linux world. The Hauppauge/Techotrend card and the Siemens card. The Hauppauge/TT card seems like quite a safe choice, but also a bit expensive. I think I could order a Hauppauge/TT from Germany for around 230 euros and a Siemens for about 150,-. If I've understood correctly the Hauppauge/TT should work well with linux. But at least a couple of months ago there was some problems with the Siemens card. I'm connected to the HTV cable network in Helsinki, Finland, and the problems with the Siemens card had something to do with HTV's usage of both qam-64 and qam-128 in their network if I remember correctly. Have these problems been resolved yet or should I just go with the Hauppauge/TT card.

Another thing with full featured cards is the capablility to output streams in RGB or at least s-video format. Or do they all support only composite output?

And what about the budget cards. Do these cards have the same problems as their full featured 'big brothers' respectively? So I guess what I'm asking is, is the ARM chip responsible for the mpeg decoding basically the only difference between a full featured and a budget card?

Also, regarding the common interface modules, if I ever need one. Are these somehow related to the dvb cards, i.e do I have to buy the card and the module from the same manufacturer, or can I basically use any ci module with any card?

One more stupid one: Any recomendations on where to buy the card? Are there any proven good, cheap providers?

So, quite a lot of questions in the end. If any of you can help me with these questions or point me to some appropriate documentation I'd be very thankful.

Best regards,

Juha

[1] no, I don't own a dxr3 card and neither do I intend to get one
[2] I know of at least one project that tries to accomplish something like a budget+videocard combination, namely http://df-gp.sourceforge.net , but I don't know if in development anymore


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