[vdr] Re: Building a VDR box

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

On Mon, 2002-09-09 at 21:17, Rene Bartsch wrote:
> 
> Can be done with the MPlayer/MP3 patch/plugin
> 
>  play some games,
> 
> Use your linux-box as PC.
> 
>  maybe even
> > read my e-mail.
> 
> Use your linux-box as PC or send your emails to TV-screen by svdrp-port
> (There was a patch around some month ago ...)
> 
>  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 full-featured DVB-cards have a V4L-interface where you can grab the
> picture and send it to the Matrox. For this, you can use kvdr (especially
> written
> for VDR) or a patched version of Xawtv.
> 
>  The pros would be obvious but what would the cons be, if any
> 
> The picture quality will be less than with a DVB-S for movies ...
> and you have to run X.
> 
> > (given that it would even be possible)?
> >
> > Thanks in advance
> >

I'm not sure what you mean by 'use your linux box as a PC'? The thing
is, that I'm planing on not connecting a monitor to the box, only a TV.
And I only have one free slot on my receiver, so I can't connect both
the g400 and a dvb-c board to the tv. And I'd like to be able to use the
box as a PC via tv occationally but I don't know if I can do that, ie.
use a browser in the tv for example, if I have only connected the dvb
card to the tv.

Is it really so that if I circulate the picture via the g400, the video
quality will suffer noticeably?

Thanks for your patience in answering these probably stupid questions.
As you can see I'm pretty new to the scene. thanks.