On Wed, 2005-05-18 at 11:38 +0200, Nicolas Huillard wrote:
{snippage}
I'd definitely recommend CLE266 / software decoding. The details depend on your hardware setup : use Xine if you have or need X (either vdr-xine or xineliboutput), which nearly requires a keyboard/mouse. Use softdevice if you want a real set-top-box (no keyboard or mouse, just the remote). Using the VGA-out of the mobo will give you full resolutions on LCD TV, even s-video out could be perfect in the next months.
I'm currently setting up and testing an Epia MII13000 system using the xine plugin and the S-Video output. The quality of this is now quite good as long as you use a new version of the Unichrome driver which supports the 720x576Noscale modes (for PAL, at least: I think there are equivalent modes for NTSC).
I personnaly use lastest VDR + softdevice, which requires compiling/packaging skills. This is definately rewarding. The simplest way is to use the FF HW decoder. If you want to use the most hardware of you mobo, without compiling, go for vdr-xine or xineliboutput.
- vdr-xine : the plugin provides a socket through which a regular Xine
conn connect and get the VDR output. There is recent network support (VDR on the server, Xine on a remote client). Problems can arise because you have two processes to manage (client + server), not counting the whole X)
- xineliboutput : the author didn't announce it on this ML (lastest
version is quite recent). Directly link libxine in the VDR binary, thus no client/server problem, but still the whole Xine functionnality, and requires X.
With the above setup, I am seeing a CPU load of ca. 1-2% for X itself and anything from 6-35% for xine. I have yet to sort out what is causing the range of CPU loads: other people have mentioned a figure of ca. 15% if hardware decoding is working properly.
I am starting X using 'startx' with a very minimal .xinitrc which just runs xine in a loop with the desired options.
If you already have a full-featured card, you can try the output from each and see which works best.
Cheers,
Laz