On 21/04/07, Tony Houghton h@realh.co.uk wrote:
In 1849e5180704201150v36099a6u1f61a89fef75e0d5@mail.gmail.com, Alasdair Campbell wrote:
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'm seeing something similar to that with More4 & other less popular channels on UK DVB-T. The lower resolution or incorrect imprinted aspect ratio causes the OSD to zoom to the left two thirds, with the right third off screen.
As this only happens on one or two channels that I watch, It's not bothering me too much. xineliboutput is exactly what I need at the moment, with my headless recording server and one streaming client - I wanted to control the server osd directly for now.
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.
When I was using softdevice I had a 4:3 TV, but wanted to view 16:9 content in full (so with black horizontal bars above and below video). With this setup, interlaced video would show artifacts. I believe that's been fixed by the kind softdevice guys.
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.
I had issues with audio sync with softdevice too, can't really say how it deals now, as I'm underpowered.
So boxstar will give me direct control over VDR similar to xineliboutput? I hadn't realised that. At the moment I'm not looking to change my setup, just tweak what I have :-)
(Sorry if the formatting on this email is all wrong, I'm writing this with lynx on the console, as my laptop is without X at the moment...)