[vdr] DVBVideoLAN - FAQ

[Markus Winkler <markus.winkler@gmxpro.de>]

Hi,

added a FAQ regarding DVBVideoLAN to http://pulp.mine.nu/dvbvideolan

Regards
	Markus

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Q: Which are the requirements?

A: There are several.
    First, the linux machine:
    - A DVB card
    - Linux drivers from www.linuxtv.org
    - VDR 0.99 from Klaus Schmidinger
    - A kernel with Multicast networking enabled.
    Second, the windows machine:
    - Lots of MHz. The DirectShow part eats much power. I'm testing with a 
P3-750 and
      the cpu load is at about 50-80%, depends on the channel. I try to 
lower this sometimes.
    - A demultiplexer and a mpeg2decoder as a DirectShow filter, which 
supports mpeg2
      transport streams. You have one, if you can replay a vdr/pva 
recording with your
      MediaPlayer. If it's not working, dvbpl will not work.
    - A videocard with overlay support
    - WindowsXP or Windows2000. I don't have any other windows operating 
system to test.
      Perhaps Windows95/98 work as well, but it's untested
    - DirectX8.0a. No other version tested.

Q: The Player asks for a msvcrtd.dll, where do i find it?

A: You can download it from the this site. Copy the dll into your 
player-directory.

Q: Which demuxer and decoder for mpeg2 should I use?

A: As far as I know, there are two. Elecard and Ligos. I prefer the one 
from Elecard.
    www.elecard.com.

Q: How do I apply the patch on VDR?

A: Simply go in your clean VDR-0.99 dir and enter zcat 
vdr-0.99-dvbvl...diff.gz | patch -p1

Q: What do I have to do afterwards?

A: First, you have to set the following environment variables:
    DVBVL_DEST with the destination ip
    DVBVL_PORT with the port
    Example for bash:
    export DVBVL_DEST="224.0.1.2"
    export DVBVL_PORT="5004"
    You have to use 224.0.1.2 and 5004 if you want to use the windows 
player, because these
    settings are hard coded into the source filter. I don't know yet how to 
set these values
    from outside DirectShow.

    Second, setup the route using something like:
    /sbin/route add -net 224.0.0.0 netmask 240.0.0.0 dev eth0

Q: VDR-Crashes!

A: This is a very new project and I'm sure, there are bugs in it. Please 
report your problems and
    I'll try to fix it.

Q: DVBVideoLAN Player crashes!

A: See the question above.

Q: DVBVideoLAN Player doesn't stop synchronizing.

A: The reception and decoding of the mpeg2stream is very timecritical. 
Especially while
    identifying the stream there shouldn't be much stream errors. Try 
streaming another
    channel. Restart the player.

Q: Player is working, but after some time, audio and video are getting out 
of sync.

A: Problem is known. As far as I know, this happens after too many stream 
errors. You can
    check this with the help of dvbrtp.log. Since the decoding of audio and 
video are
    independent from each other, yet the only solution is to restart the 
player.

Q: Which channels cause problems, which are know to work.

A; I didn't check all of them of course. The lower the bitrate the better. 
MTV Europe, Viva
    are working very well, ARD, ZDF, Sat1, RTL are ok. Pro7 isn't working 
at all, don't know
    why.

Q: What about the sources?

A: You have the sources for the linux part. For the windows part, I didn't 
release them yet.