[vdr] HD output - your current favourites

[Luca Olivetti]

En/na Gavin Hamill ha escrit:
> My current vdr-1.4.7 (compiled 2 years ago as of tomorrow!) is still
> serving me well.. I have a Technotrend FF DVB-C doing all the heavy
> lifting, but as time moves on and HD content becomes more prevalent, I'm
> thinking of moving up.
> 
> Right now I have an EPIA 800MHz quiet PC with the Technotrend giving me
> lovely SCART RGB out... if I got a nice LCD TV, what setup would be
> ideal for driving the HDMI input?

I don't have a nice lcd/plasma tv, so I don't use hdmi. I currently play 
hd content (from a handful of satellite channels, only one of them, 
bbchd, carrying real programming) on my laptop (1680x1050 resolution, a 
tad smaller than the full-hd 1920x1080), which has a nvidia card, using 
xine-plugin on the vdr pc and xine-vdpau on the laptop.
With vdpau almost everything is offloaded to the graphic card, so it 
needs really little cpu, it's possible it could also work on your epia, 
provided you can add a pci/agp card with a suitable nvidia chipset and 
are willing to use their closed driver. I have to say that the result 
seems pretty good to me.
Ati/Amd and intel will probably offer some hd acceleration in the near 
future, however I don't think they offer anything right now for linux.
I found this benchkmark:

http://gwenole.beauchesne.info/en/blog/2009/06/22/video_decode_acceleration_benchmarks

> 
> Most of the content is still SD, and I am a real pedant about smooth
> video / interlaced output for scrolling text / live sports. Any time
> that I've played with vdr-xine or xineliboutput over my years with VDR,
> it's always been a bit juddery due to VGA timing not matching up with
> the TV.. is that improved any in the world of HD / HDMI?

Again, I cannot tell about hdmi (though I think I'd get similar 
results), but on my laptop screen sd content is upscaled acceptably by 
xine-vdpau (the scaling and deinterlacing is done in hardware with 
vdpau). Horizontally scrolling text is not very good IMO.
I your tv scaler is better than the nvidia one (though it has to be a 
high end tv set for that) I suppose that you can feed sd content through 
hdmi, though everybody is suggesting to scale on the pc and feed the tv 
with its native resolution.

Bye
-- 
Luca