In 1849e5180704201150v36099a6u1f61a89fef75e0d5@mail.gmail.com, Alasdair Campbell wrote:
On 20/04/07, Markus Schuster ma.schuster@gmx.de wrote:
BUT I have to admit that xineliboutput uses only half of the CPU power of softdevice, so it's video decoder has to be more efficient...
Odd, because xine also uses ffmpeg. Perhaps it has a more efficient decoder for MPEG 2 and uses ffmpeg only for more exotic formats.
Because I'm using a 550Mhz P3, my only option is to use the xineliboutput until I figure out what is causing the big CPU load variations. As I've never had softdevice successfully running on this television, I can't really say anything about it's quality, though I know there's been lots of work in respect to the matrox cards.
Another alternative is to use the other vdr xine plugin with df_xine, which gives very good results with my Matrox (G450). About the only problem is that it sometimes doesn't scale the OSD correctly, chopping off the right hand side. Something to do with 16:9 vs 4:3 I'm sure. And I don't know whether it can handle letterboxing an interlaced 16:9 picture for a 4:3 TV. I heard that softdevice gets, or used to get that wrong, as if it treated the two fields as one frame and scaled them together, rather than scaling each field separately. Maybe the hardware doesn't support the latter, in which case it would have to use slow software scaling.
My experience with softdevice was that the A/V sync was a bit off for live TV and way off for recordings. df_xine is spot on.
If you want to be able to stop/start df_xine and/or watch other videos all with one remote control you can use boxstar as a front-end.