On Tuesday 05 Jan 2010, Tony Houghton wrote:
I had problems with softdevice, including A/V sync, but I think that was one of the areas the developers were putting a lof of effort into improving. Another thing I like about the xine plugins is that you can leave VDR running in the background for recording and stop and start the player frontend at will. For me xineliboutput and vdr-fbfe worked very well on a Matrox G450 connected to a SD TV, except that it would drop quite a lot of frames to achieve A/V sync.
I'm currently using a Matrox G450 with softdevice and it works pretty much flawlessly for me at the moment with a bog-standard CRT tele'.
I agree with Timothy D. Lenz. VDR desperately needs a decent player that works on mainstream graphics cards and allows full use of the OSD along with miscellaneous other features tailored for TV viewing. vdr-sxfe is quite good, but not good enough.
I'm watching this sort of thread with interest...no free HD content in the UK yet (at least over DVB-T) but it's on the way in the next few years. No immediate need for getting an HD tele' or beefing up my vdr box for HD playback but putting in a small, purpose-built decoder card definitely seems to be the way forward.
It would be nice to see support for the Broadcom HD decoders in FFMPEG so they can be used by softdevice but I'm not holding my breath! Once I have HD transmissions at my disposal, I'll definitely be buying such a decoder card or whatever they've been superseded by! Maybe someone will also have made some DVB-T2 devices by then!
Cheers,
Laz