[vdr] X11 on DVB: X11out plugin

[Jürgen Schmitz <j.schmitz@web.de>]

Project's homepage:          http://www.js-home.org/vdr

Description:

This plugin shows X11 on DVB... and is work in progress and only
a functional study at the moment - but working!

Requirements:

Xvfb (virtual x frame buffer - part of X11)
ffmpeg
NetPBM

Install:

ffmpeg has to be patched with the patch in the patch directory,
thanks to Andreas Kool (analogTV plugin) who made this patch for
his plugin.

How it works:

Add the plugin with "-P x11out" into your vdr start mechanism (runvdr).

When vdr starts Xvfb is started as display 5. When you select the x11out
menu item in the main menu 2 additional programs are started:

A shell loop transforming the xwd memory mapped file into a jpeg using
NetPBM. This is done once per second.

And ffmpeg converting this jpeg into a mpeg 1 stream.

I don't know why but ffmpeg works best with jpeg, I've first used
ppm as image file type which would reduce CPU usage but this gave
unusable output on TV.

What you can do:

After starting vdr which the plugin added a X11 display 5 is available,
so you can place any X11 output on it. When you start the x11out main
menu entry you will see it. If you don't start anything you will only
see the typical empty X11 screen.

Example:

xclock -d -update 1 -display :5

Future:

I'm planing some kind of interface to allow other vdr plugins to use my
X11out plugin. The X11out plugin could handle the keys or simply send
them to the other plugins. My X11 toolkit library Xclasses could be 
modified to support this key handling and would allow to draw something 
on the X11 screen without knowing much about X11.

With this features it could be possible to give some existings
plugins a better output, eg. for MP3 players, web browsers, ...



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