[vdr] A couple of oddities with vdr 1.26, analogtv, pvr350 and mp3

[Markus Bauer <mkbauer@web.de>]

Hi,

I am trying to setup vdr on my system. (I already have MythTV working on 
it, but I happen to like the look and feel of vdr much better -- it 
feels more retro :-)

I don't have any DVB hardware, but I am connected to analog cable tv, so 
I chose the Hauppauge PVR 350 card as primary input and output device by 
using vdr's analogtv- and pvr350-plugins.

Vdr works: live TV, timeshifting, recording and playback are fully 
functional. However, I have noticed a few problems. Since I am not 
shure, whether I've messed something up during my installation, I'd like 
some feedback on whether this is normal behaviour:

- Playback of recordings: forward, stop, play (and pause in live TV) 
only work after a delay of around 3 seconds. The same delay also happens 
for channel switching. Is this the normal behaviour? Also, after 
switching channels, the picture quality decreases for some more seconds 
(but finally returns to normal quality). MythTV also has this channel 
switching delays, but it does not show the decrease of image quality, 
nor does it have delays for forward, pause and play when replaying 
recordings.

- Compling of analogtv shows a huge number of warnings. Most of these 
claim that compiling analogtv with gcc 3.3.4 might fail...

- Playing back MP3 using the mp3 plugin: Basically works.

  * However, this is only the case if I use OSS output. I cannot use 
DVB output. I suppose the pvr350 plugin does not emulate a dvb device's 
sound output facilities. Correct?

  * Probably related with this: Changing the options for the background 
image (black, still video) does not have any effect at all. I only get a 
frozen image of the last channel vdr was showing... I assume the 
mp3-plugin is not able to influence the pvr350's output?

  * If I turn on the background scan (for mp3 tags and level 
information) vdr freezes after playing a couple of mp3s. It still prints 
mp3-plugin's regular debug messages and plays the file to its end, but 
it does not answer to any keys on the keyboard or the remote. This is 
reproducably only the case when turning on background scan. Does anyone 
else experience this? I suspect something is wrong with the cuncurrent 
threads involved in the background scan... Could my 2.6-kernel be the 
problem here?

  * MP3 infos (tag information and level information) are not cached 
for  most songs I've already played. The cache file id3info.cache only 
contains a few songs played in the current session...

Maybe you have some ideas about these smaller oddities?
Apart from those, I am quite happy with vdr. Thanks to all developers 
who worked hard on this...

Thanks,
Markus

Configuration:
Pentium III-800 with 256M memory running:
Ubuntu Linux 4.10 (kernel 2.6.9)
ivtv-0.1.10-pre2-ck115i
vdr 1.2.6 (using LD_ASSUME_KERNEL=2.4.1 just to be shure)
analogtv-plugin 0.9.33
mp3-plugin 0.9.7
pvr350-plugin 0.0.3