[vdr] Re: DVD - quality ?

[Carsten Koch <Carsten.Koch@icem.de>]

Tom wrote:
...
> 1) A nice hifi-like case
> (my wife needs to believe its a new Video Recorder :-). Colors need to
> be either black or silver. I have looked at several previous postings,
> but either the cases are ugly (design: shining plastic) or sold out (c't
> case). Any europe hints appreciated...

No problem.
Just use the case of your old VCR for the LIRC
receiver and put the real VDR PC in another room
or into a locker. That will also solve the noise
problem.


> 2) DVD quality:
> Audio magazines warn that buying a DVD-player without RGB-Out is a
> no-no, as the composite out looks like crap on 28" (82cm) TV onward. Is
> there someone willing to post a comparison between DVD-player w/RGB and
> VDR with
> Composite or home-built J9-Connector ?

At least the original DVB-S card does have RGB output on
an internal connector.
However, I am using the S-Video out (with my 100" beamer)
and the quality is just fine.


> What to do with DivX. It is more and more becoming a standard

I agree.
But unless you require real time recording to Divx, a
400 Mhz CPU will do just fine. After all, this is Linux,
so it should be trivial to create a script that takes a 
VDR MPEG2 recording and re-encode it to Divx in the background.
Unfortunately, with a weak CPU you will only be able to
play that back via the graphics card, because the DVB-S
card can only play back MPEG, so you would have to re-
encode the Divx to MPEG on the fly, which needs a stronger
CPU.
As an alternative, buy one of these new 160GB Maxtor disks
and your video recorder will have ~50 hours of playing
time even with MPEG2.

Carsten.