[vdr] Re: Building a VDR box

[Vesa Holopainen <vholma@pp.htv.fi>]

On Mon, 2002-09-09 at 20:14, Antti O Lammi wrote:
> 
> TechnoTrend DVB-C "Premium" and Hauppage DVB-C (not the NOVA el cheapo
> model) are proven to work in Helsinki Cable Network. Multiplex 8 (138MHz
> with discovery etc) can not be tuned at least with the current drivers.
> Somebody mentioned getting the multiplex work in Windows but i have no
> further info on that (Or interest to test Windows drivers my self).
> NEWSTRUCT driver should work "as is" now when Jaakko made a patch for it,
> and the old driver works if you fine tune "tuner.c" a bit.
> 
> I have no other information on the "Nova" (Hauppage Nova, Technotrend
> "Budget") cards than Pay TV channels are not supported (Common Interface).
> 
> Siemens Activity cards do not work in HTV network.
> 
> I bought my Technotrend "Premium" card from www.ebay.de. Hauppage card is
> also available from www.avitos.de for affordable price.

Thanks for the aswer. I've tried to look for information on these two
boards but couldn't really find, especially for the TechnoTrend board
and now I've got a few additional questions. Do these cards also have a
digital s/pdif output for sound, and is it supported in the driver or do
I need a soundcard also? What about video output, do they have s-video
output or only composite? And what about a remote control, is it
included/supported?

> 
> > And secondly, I'd like to be able to do other thing as well with my box,
> > ie.watch movies in all formats, play some games, play mp3:s, maybe even
> > read my e-mail. I've understood that playing movies is possible by
> > decoding the video stream and re-encoding it to mpeg2. But I've got a
> > matrox g400 card which I could use in my box so I'd like to know whether
> > it would be possible use the tv-out feature of the g400 card in the VDR
> > framework. The pros would be obvious but what would the cons be, if any
> > (given that it would even be possible)?

This sounds like plenty of CPU power is required. And what about the
quality of the video when encoded in mpeg1, does it suffer alot? I'd
like to be able to use the G400, if at all possible/reasonable, since I
think it has a great picture in the tv-out (i'm planing on not using a
monitor on the box) and I could avoid the re-encoding. And it would also
buy me things found in a normal pc, like web browsing, games, e-mail and
so on. And looking at the DirectFB list recently, it seems to me that
thanks to Ville Syrjälä, it also has nice support for YUV overlays on
the CRTC2 nowadays (probably totally irrelevant to vdr, but hey).  But
it seems to me it has a lot of drawbacks aswell.

> MPlayer can decode all formats and encode them to MPEG-1 in real time, so
> your DVB card can output them to your TV.
> 
> 
>