[vdr] Re: Software replay plugin Was: SPDIF out

[Mike Pieper <mike@pieper-family.de>]

Hi,

I'm currently working on such a thing. For a long time I had a
DirectFb-plugin which was using the v4l device of a full featured DVB
card. It was running fine and the picture was very good (G400), but I
often had lookups and it was difficult to built up the system (patch
after patch ...).

Now I've switched to X11 because X11 is more widely supported. And when
you have a X11 screen on your TV you have instantly thousends of
applications for it (Web-Browser, Video-Conference, ...). This is a
great advantage for _me_. The picture quality is not so good, but _I_
can live with it.

Currently I have X11 running in a 1024x576 resolution (16:9) which
allows to display interlaced content fine. X11 is working on top of the
frame buffer device, and for it the TV-out is activated. I needed no
kernel patch to get that running!

The player plugin what I wrote is based on Xine. I tried libmpeg2,
MPlayer and GStreamer before. With libmpeg2 I got a really nice picture
and good behavior, but I had no audio. I stopped working on that having
in mind that audio support and sync support will be difficult to
implement. With mplayer I had very fast success, but it was not so
stable. Mplayer doesn't like when the stream changes and it don't likes
fast forward/backward. Also it was not possible to stop mplayer taking
the X events. Therefore when I pressed ESC (which is mapped to 'Back' in
my setup) Mplayer quits a.s.o. With GStreamer I got nothing to play.
The xine plugin currently has problems with fast channel switching and
with replay of recordings. It needs some patching in vdr and in xine.
What I like on xine is, that it supports OSD. Currently I'm painting the
OSD directly on the X-window. This looks very nice, but I didn't
implement scaling yet. Therefore the window is fixed to 768x576, but
this is not a big problem. The drawback of this OSD is that it has no
alpha blending capabilities.

If I get it stable I'll of course release it. But is has a low priority
for me. If someone wants to have the sources you can mail me. Of course
it's ok to take parts of it to make a plugin of your own.

Mike



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