[vdr] Re: A modular VDR.

[Marcus Kuba <marcus@kuba4u.de>]

Am 25.11.2001 14:30:46, schrieb Carsten Koch <Carsten.Koch@icem.de>:

>Am I missing anything that makes this a bad idea?

Yes.. there are several points where you are wrong:

>With that architecture, the DVB cards could concentrate
>on what they do best: get the data from the sky.

They also do best when decoding and showing the picture on a TV.

>The graphics card could also concentrate on what it does
>best: show the images.

This may be right for output on a monitor, but it is not for watching on a TV. There is NO 
(well, no cheap) graphics card on the market that has a TV-Out with a quality equivalent 
to the TV-Out of the DVB-S (even when you use S-Video). And on the Monitor, the 
output is either quite bad (when using DVB-S overlay) because of interlacing or it needs a 
powerful CPU (when using MPEG-Decoding on the graphics-card). And then you don't 
have a standardized hardware and must support different chipsets which support more or 
less functions.
Especially the quality of the TV-Out is an absolute KO-criterium for almost any AGP-card 
available.

>With only one DVB card, we could do timeshifting, etc.
>With a weak CPU, we could play back DivX ;-).

Not really... it may take not as much CPU for DivX as mplayers mpeg-encoding, but for 
timeshifting / replay it will need more cpu than a two-DVB-S-system.

>The OSD would not cause playback distortions or other
>problems in the firmware. It could also be as large as
>we want with as many colors as needed and would still
>perform well.

But it would need to be adapted to the graphics-card. And then you can't surely say that 
it will perform well on any card without distortions.


Greetings,   Marcus