[vdr] Re: vdr integration into Freevo

[Michal Dobrzynski <michal@appl.com.au>]

On 08/07/2004, at 1:38 AM, Rob Shortt wrote:

> I don't think the OSD for the full featured cards is capable of 
> displaying menus and graphics like the Freevo skins, memory isues and 
> such.  It might be possible to emulate how the dxr3 sdl output driver 
> works by converting everything into mpeg and then sending that to the 
> card.
>
> Being a full featured card owner myself, I don't, and would rather not 
> even use the tv-out on this card.  I am perfectly happy with using 
> DirectFB on my G400 and IMO it is more flexible, especially for Freevo 
> because we spawn more programs than for just watching tv, none of 
> which support tv-out on ff dvb cards.
>
> -Rob
Being a budget card owner who first spent $200 to get a Matrox G550 
with SCART RGB out only to be EXTREMELY dissatisfied with it's 
performance in general (and ESPECIALLY under Linux) I take some 
exception to your attempt to steer Dirk away from utilizing the TV out 
on the full featured cards.

I went to the effort of spending well over $300 to have a full featured 
DVB-S card shipped in from Germany for the sole purpose of acting as a 
TV out device (with support for SCART RGB). The image quality was 
vastly superior to the G550 even if using SVideo for output.

The Matrox may be more flexible but it's also totally useless because 
watching TV with constant visual glitches due to sync issues is 
unacceptable. As a side issue many people also require hardware MPEG 
decoding as it's the only way for them to create a system which is 
quiet enough to be a HTPC. CPU decoding or encoding isn't really much 
of an option.

Anyway. That's my 2 cents worth. Or over $500 depending on how you read 
it.

Regards,
Michal