[vdr] Popcorn as VDR frontend

[alexw]

Hi Johan,

You have a good approach. I am using the vdr-ui frontend right now which 
uses the TS from streamdev to feed the mono player. I managed to have a 
compiled version of the xine lib but I failed to use it due to deep code 
cutting to get it running. As far as I have understood you succeed to 
have xine library available on your PCH. Making an adaptation of the OSD 
layer should then not be a big issue. The complexity will reside in the 
video stream handling as you have already mentioned. Digging into other 
projects or starting a discussion in the networkedmediatank can bring a 
lot of of knowledge here.

This project sounds very interesting to me. If you need some help, I 
would be pleased to provide my support.

Regards,

Alex

Johan Andersson wrote:
> I need some advise on routes to look into on the subject.
>
> First, thank you Klaus and all for a great PVR. I have tried a lot of 
> others like Myth, MediaPortal, GBPVR etc, but the silent menusystems are 
> hopelessly inferior to having all menus on OSD. Me and my family have 
> used VDR for 2+ years now and we are all happy with it.
>
> I am not bleeding edge VDR with DVB-T in Sweden being SDTV and we have 
> only one TV-set although I'm running client/server xineliboutpout with a 
>   dedicated frontend machine.
>
> I bought myself a PCH with the idea of using it instead of my PC VDR 
> frontend.
>
> With some effort and googling I got xineliboutputs vdr-fbfe (with 
> xinelib et.al) cross compiled and runnable on the PCH.
>
> However AFAIK, the directfb usage in xinelib is based on pixelmaps 
> written to a dfb surface, all mpeg decode is done in software, this is 
> suboptimal on the PCH along with sound being a problem. Running vdr-fbfe 
> on PCH says 'DFBGetSurface() not supported' and exits.
>
> It seems people have looked into streamdev instead. I like my VDR OSD 
> though on the TV-set, am I wrong in believing that is a nono with streamdev?
>
> Now PCH has an 'IAdvancedMediaProvider' extension to directfb seemingly 
> allowing the mpeg-stream to be sent directly to the hardware, thereby 
> including both video and audio, it is sadly not fully documented in the 
> headers released by Syabas...
>
> The most promising option as I see it is to slash down vdr-fbfe to only 
> display the 'osd_command' data on a PCH DFB layer without video 
> capability and stream 'normally' to PCH using ideally the xineliboutputs 
> servers ability to supply for example an http stream. The hope being 
> that the 'vdr-fbfe' application can access directfb concurrently and 
> have the OSD displayed ontop of the video layer.
>
> Before I dig deeper into this I would like to ask the community what has 
> been tried and what routes do you see as most viable?
>
> I know of some other PCH frontend software for GBPVR Myth, ie vomp and 
> mvcpmx(?) but they seem to return me to the world of silent menus, not a 
> place I want to be.
>
> /Johan
>
>
>