[vdr] Re: More DVBs cards..with or whithout Mpeg decoder?

[Rene Bartsch <rene@bartschnet.de>]

The cards have problems with heat, current and the firmware has bugs. As
it is not completely opened source, even Convergence can't fix some
parts of the firmware.

You can think the DVB-S to be of four parts (only logically, of course):

Tuner, data-bus, CI-interface and MPEG-decoder.

The full-featured cards have all four, ARM-cpu and firmware for decoding.

Any card has tuner and bus of course, but the low-budgets don't have
ARM, firmware, MPEG-decoder and CI (except the Nova-CI).

You only need the MPEG-decoder for hardware-based playback on !THAT!
card (e.g. analog video/audio outputs of that card or /dev/v4l/videoX)

The low-budget cards have no video/audio-outputs and no V4L-device.
They simply provide the TS-stream (but the complete TS, so parallel
recording on the transponder tuned to is theoretically possible - hope
VDR will support that in future, while the full-featured cards can't
provide the complete TS (the pids are filtered by the firmware).

And the ARM/firmware is to weak to receive and play at the same time.
So no time-shifting is possible with a full featured-card.

That's why you need a second card (but only a tuner and a data-bus, so
take a low-budget)

So you usually need only one full-featured card for VDR and the others
can be low budgets (A driver for Skystar's B2C2 would be great as they
are extremely cheap, but there are no specs about that card ...). And if
there will be the plug-in-API we even can drop full-featured DVB-S for
the primary card as we could use plug-ins for graphic-card or
MPEG-decoder-cards.

Hope this very long statement will help some people.


Rene