[vdr] Skystar2/DXR3-VDR

[Onno Kortmann <onno@gmx.net>]

Hi all,

I'm in the process of building myself a VDR PC, with the following specs:

Hardware:
-------
In: Technisat Skystar2
Out: Hollywood Plus (DXR3)
CPU: 300MHz Cyrix MediaGX MMX, overclocked from 200MHz (A modified 'Met@box' 
PC-based set-top-box system). The CPU runs really stable and cool, no hangups 
or similar things, even with hours of 100% CPU- and heavy I/O-load.
As it may be of interest, the Skystar2 and the Hollywood Plus have a shared 
IRQ line (PCI riser card).
RAM: 64MB SDRAM
IDE chipset: CS5530, with DMA enabled and running stable.

Software:
-------
System: Debian testing, latest packages. No daemons running except one getty, 
inetd (for telnet access) and various kernel threads.
Kernel: Debian supplied kernel-source-2.6.8, FS is ReiserFS. The DVB drivers 
are replaced
with the latest from CVS (because I have a mt352 Samsung frontend which is not 
supported in the 2.6.8 kernel). the em8300-driver is also the latest from 
CVS.
VDR software: developer version 1.3.11, integrated and patched with uupdate 
into a custom debian package, with the following plugins:
dxr3-0.2.3-pre2 and streamdev-0.3.3-pre2 (see below).


Now, I have the following problems and related questions:

1- Dropouts.
My main problem. The system flickers and has many unacceptable audio and video 
glitches and dropouts. It does sometime happen that the stream simply stops 
and doesn't restart without manually switching to another channel.
The problem was a bit (but just a bit) worse with 200MHz CPU clock, so 
increasing the clock helped a bit.
With a dvbstream-to-mplayer pipe, I get a stable picture including sound, but 
mplayer has no recording/zapping functionality :|
I also did the following things:
- swapping the module load order (maybe I'm naive and wrong here, but I 
suppose this also swaps the order of the IRQ handlers in the kernel -- ?)
-- different firmwares for the em8300. 

2. Is it possible to increase OSD responsiveness?
The OSD sometimes lags more than 5s behind the keypresses. It may even happen 
that keypresses are ignored at all. I'm setting the LD_ASSUME_KERNEL=2.4.1 
environment variable (and tried it without). With a disabled video output (an 
option I got by installing the streamdev-plugin), the OSD works as expected.

3. Setting the controlling terminal.
The only way I'm able to use vdr-kbd on the correct terminal (PS2 keyboard 
connector) is to directly start it in a shell on that terminal.
The option "-t" doesn't seem to work for me, nor does the debian init.d/vdr 
script. If I start vdr-kbd from telnet with "-t /dev/tty0", the VDR runs but 
does not respond to anything.
4. Blanking while recording?
Recording adds even more dropouts, so it would be very nice to blank the 
screen or display a "recording" OSD message while recording (if the hardware 
is not really capable of doing both things in parallel - which I still hope 
it is). Timeshifting capability or recording while viewing is nice, but not 
too important for me.
The recording seems to contain fewer hiccups than the live video.
Doing a dvbstream [...] > file.mpeg works fine, though...

Just being curious, I also installed the streamdev-server plugin. It seems 
that the picture over a rather old, 10MBit ISA ethernet card is better than 
the direct output on the em8300 device.

Do you have any ideas or suggestions?

Best regards and thanks for any help!

Onno