vdr December 2005

vdr@linuxtv.org

134 participants
138 discussions

VDR on a Pentium 166 mhz: it works !
by Travel Factory S.r.l. 15 Dec '05

15 Dec '05

Just to share my experience with really old hardware. I found a couple of IBM Network Station in the dust bin of a friend company and took them home. They have a Pentium 166, 128 mb ram. I fed one of these with a Nexus and an avermedia 771 (DVB-T). I installed a Suse 10 kernel and using the drivers included in the distribution (installed latest firmware) VDR compiles and Nexus is perfectly recognized - I'm working on the aver, recognized by the kernel but not working on VDR. I want to say that VDR seems to work flawlessy in this slow environment. Recording of one channel (RAI 2 on hotbird) results in a 40% CPU, of which 20% for VDR and 20% for system. Ram is almost fully used. Recording of two channels (RAI 1 and RAI 2) makes VDR really irresponsive, but the recordings seems to be ok. Francesco

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the tuning threads
by Jeremy Hall 15 Dec '05

15 Dec '05

Hello, My apologies if I seem a bit dense here, but there have been a few threads either on vdr or linux-dvb that have my attention--yet I am having a little difficulty putting it all together. There is a thread about fixing for 8vsb tuning that has a patch which sets some #defines for (I think) how long you think it will take to tune a channel on your system, but I'm not sure I understand what it's trying to resolve. my situation: I have a rotor connected to a diseqc switch connected to a skystar budget that uses stv0299 as its frontend, but overrides voltage and possibly other routines with flexcop_set_* (like flexcop_set_voltage) etc When I'm trying to align the dish, what is the best recommended way to proceed? I remember reading some thread about new tuning modes getting checked into the linuxtv-dvb dvb-kernel CVS (now probably v4l-kernel) but it's quite hard to align a dish now. What are the requirements for setting voltage, tone, and other fe events from plugins? Older vdr versions seemed to authorize plugins to do this, but now newer ones seem to want the sets to occur from within the vdr loop, so you have to modify the vdr core code to allow a plugin to trigger events from within the main loop (is this thread-safe) So can somebody take a moment please and describe what happens to vdr in the tuning thread? What states can it be in and what is it trying to do? I know some on this list would suggest I read through the source, which I am capable of doing, but I'm asking somebody who is fluent in this to just take about five minutes to write up a pseudocode explanation just to make sure we're all on the same page. I think if we had a brief description in one message describing bullet points for what everybody's trying to solve efficiency would improve. NOTE: it takes about 25 seconds to zoom across the sky, so whatever code gets written should understand that. Thanks in advance _J

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Channels.conf at download
by Paul Lacatus 15 Dec '05

15 Dec '05

Are there for donwload some channels.conf files for the some sattelites ?

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Xine-plugin: crop mode / rescaling or similar?
by Harald Milz 15 Dec '05

15 Dec '05

Hi, as I wrote in an earlier mail, I am using softdevice (with a G550 card) quite successfully. One of the real advantages of softdevice is its crop mode that allows you to crop a 14:9 or 16:9 rectangle from a 4:3 broadcasting and rescale it to full screen on a 16:9 capable TV set (1280x720). Really nice. The downside is that my current living room machine is just not living room compatible (looks and noise). I would like to build a new VDR with a mini-ITX board (CLE266 or CN400) and use the xine libs and plugin. The question is, does xine provide something similar? I suspect that the answer is no because the rescaling needs to be done _after_ the MPEG2 decoding, which in case of the VIA chip is done in hardware. Is that right or is there hope? And - will xine rescale the picture to 1280x720 if it is encoded anamorphous? Softdevice does that automatically if you tell it the screen is 16:9. Really nice. :-) Alternatively, how good is the CLE266/CN400 support in DirectFB? That would be an alternative (with softdevice in turn). Most private TV stations in Germany simply don't get it as far as anamorphous encoding... -- There was a young poet named Dan, Whose poetry never would scan. When told this was so, He said, "Yes, I know. It's because I try to put every possible syllable into that last line that I can."

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2 budget cards + softdevice + vdr 1.3.31
by Ari Koponen 15 Dec '05

15 Dec '05

Hi everyone, I've been trying to setup a system that has budget cards and no FF cards at all. With one DVB card it works well enough but I can't get VDR to use the second card. Has anyone experience with this kind of setup? My DVB cards are Technotrend dvb-c budget v1.0 and terratec cinergy dvb-c 1200. I think it might be a driver issue because zap doesn't seem to tune to both cards simultaneuously but both tune separately. The modules that I load are budget and budget_av. Any suggestions?

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RE: [vdr] Buffer Messages in Logs
by Martin Dauskardt 14 Dec '05

14 Dec '05

> Date: Tue, 13 Dec 2005 17:26:02 -0500 > From: Dave <inssomniak(a)mountaincable.net> > Subject: [vdr] Buffer Messages in Logs > To: vdr(a)linuxtv.org > > Now and then I get these sectons of messages in my logs, sometimes it > will go several hours before they appear, and other times it goes only > 10 minutes before a chunk is written.. Vdr 1.3.37 with Softdevice CVS: > After it goes "clearing transfer buffer to avoid overflows" (at the end) > they stop appearing for a while. > > Dec 13 16:40:01 vdr cron[13273]: (root) CMD (test -x /usr/sbin/run-crons > && /usr/sbin/run-crons ) > Dec 13 16:50:11 vdr vdr[10997]: buffer usage: 60% (tid=2195465) > Dec 13 16:50:13 vdr vdr[10997]: buffer usage: 70% (tid=2195465) > Dec 13 16:50:14 vdr vdr[10997]: buffer usage: 80% (tid=2195465) > Dec 13 16:50:15 vdr vdr[10997]: buffer usage: 90% (tid=2195465) > Dec 13 16:50:15 vdr vdr[11811]: clearing transfer buffer to avoid > overflows I can confirm that this is a serious problem that a lot of people have - even with FF-cards. We discussed this in german vdrportal forum, and we have not found a solution yet. I tried this http://linuxtv.org/pipermail/vdr/2005-November/006393.html without success. Also this patch http://linuxtv.org/pipermail/vdr/2005-November/006337.html did not solve the problem - but it seems to take a few minutes longer until the buffer is full. I wonder why the buffer problem appears regularly on some machines and others never report this issue.

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[seems to be solved] sync problems (was: too many processes?)
by André Bischof 14 Dec '05

14 Dec '05

Hello everybody, as I wrote I was investigating in sync problems I experienced. I haven't tested it thoroughly, but on a first glance it looks like adding the kernel parameter "elevator=cfq" to grub's menu.lst to run another scheduler solves the problem (this was suggested on vdr-portal.de). Thus kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.12-1-386 root=/dev/hda1 ro vga=0x31A elevator=cfq did it for me. Thought to just let you know, in case someone else is experiencing similar problems. HTH, André

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Interesting freeze
by Jarmo Järvenpää 14 Dec '05

14 Dec '05

Hi all, An interesting feature has came up with kernel 2.6.14 and hauppauge Nova-T (the older model) and the dxr3. If the computer has been down and started again, modules load up, vdr starts and bang -> the computer seems locked up (even the numlock doesn't light). This has happened multiple times already (and will happen if there's a power loss). I've noticed that if the computer is left on for about 10 minutes, miraculously, everything start working again. I've tried to start vdr with a plain 'vdr' command, and still, the computer will freeze (hauppauge drivers and dxr3's kernel modules were previously loaded though). Not sure what causes this, but in case somebody stumbles into this, just wait for recovery :-) BR, Jarmo

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Dxr3 lockups
by Damien Bally 14 Dec '05

14 Dec '05

Hello I use vdr with a dxr3 card (the signal comes from a nova-t) and it randomly crashes. The syslog shows no particular trouble. Only the dxr3 hardware (or the driver) seems to be faulty, as I get a still image on the tv just after the lockup. Is there a way to stop the tv playback, during recordings, in order to improve stability ? Thanks Damien

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Nova-T USB vs NOva-T USB2 for epia PVR
by Wookey 14 Dec '05

14 Dec '05

Hi, I'm new to this PVR lark, although I have been using an EPIA min-ITX box as a Divx/DVD player using geexbox for a year or two. I hope this list is OK for asking relative newbie questions - please point me elsewhere if it's not the right spot. I want to add DVB-T reception to my media box, and ideally have it replace the video recorder too, but it remains to be seen if it has sufficient welly. A fair amount of net-wandering suggests that the Hauppage winTV USB and USB2 cards are both suported but they use different chipsets - is that right? Any pros and cons between them? My gut feeling is that the USB2 should be better as the interface to it is faster, but the hauppage specs say that the older card needs a 500Mhz host, whilst the newer one needs a 1Ghz host. Does the newer one really need more from its host, or this just an effect of the (windowsa) software they supply? Also I can find a lot more docs for the older device - is the new one a bad idea at this stage? My box is very slow (and thus silent) - it's an EPIA 800Mhz box, too old to have built in MPEG deconding. It plays divxs fine, but glitches slightly playing Full-res DVDs. I think adding a hollywood + PCI card will help it do playback with less load, and is the only chance of it being able to play something whilst recording something else. But that will fill its only PCI slot, which is why I am considering USB for the TV input. Does this make sense, or should I forget trying to play and record at the same time and just put in a PCI winTV card? I could upgrade the box to use an M10,000 motherboard and an internal DVB-T card instead but that's best part of 100 quid more expensive, so I'm hoping to get away with it. TV quality is not too important, so long as it's not much worse than a VCR, that's fine. Also, is there a distro like geexbox which boots up quickly to PVR mode, with everything controlled through the OSD? TIA Wookey -- Aleph One Ltd, Bottisham, CAMBRIDGE, CB5 9BA, UK Tel +44 (0) 1223 811679 work: http://www.aleph1.co.uk/ play: http://www.chaos.org.uk/~wookey/

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vdr December 2005