[vdr] Best practices for running vdr-xine

[Petri Helin]

Lars Olsson wrote:
> I am a happy VDR user since a couple of years ago. Before VDR, I used 
> Mythtv but switched due to its hardware requirements and bugs.
> My VDR is an (very) old Duron 700 MHz with 1 Technotrend FF card and 1 
> PVR 350 card.
> It has been no problem recording two channels (SD) at a time and watch a 
> different recording trough FF card tv-out. FANTASTIC!
> The VDR box is soon going to be replaced by a faster machine, but will 
> keep the current tv cards.
> 
> The problem is now to find out how to setup VDR on my new computer.
> Should I use
> - FF-TVout?
> - vdr-xine
> - xine-liboutput?
> 
> By just reading this thread, I can see that people has different favourites.
> My personal fealing is that VDR is lacking recommendations / good 
> documentation on how to setup/configure "TV-out" in the best way, or at 
> least describe pros/cons for each alternative.  Is this a point where 
> Mythtv beats VDR? I hope that I am wrong.
> Or have I missed anything?
> 
> regards,
> baronen
> 

That depends solely on your display device. If you use an "old style" 
CRT or something similar with an interlaced input, your FF-card will 
give you the best output. But if you have a progressive display with 
preferably a digital input you might want to use a software output 
device like vdr-xine or xineliboutput. Even with a reasonably slow 
system you can take advantage of vdpau with an nvidia card and have a 
perfect progressive output. There are graphic cards with both PCI and 
PCI-Express bus connection that you can acquire with a modest expense.

-Petri