On ma, 2015-04-20 at 16:05 +0300, Marko Mäkelä wrote:
On Mon, Apr 20, 2015 at 11:40:41AM +0200, Patrick Boettcher wrote:
vdr-fbfe is connecting over network to a vdr running on a full machine. No need for streamdev.
This looks interesting. Am I right assuming that the full machine will not need any video output? Can vdr-fbfe be used for editing recordings on the RPi, or is there too much latency when using 10Mb/s Ethernet to connect to an old VDR server?
Do you mean setting the marks (and letting remote VDR to do the actual editing) ? Or using VDR in RPi to cut recordings ? Cutting with RPi is probably very slow and consumes lot of limited I/O resources.
For setting editing marks - probably, I'm not sure. I rarely edit anything, and never with remote controller. When I edit, I do it with vdr-sxfe + keyboard from computer. But I think I've tried it with RPi couple of times and would remember if it was slow or wouldn't work.
Latency with 100Mbit/s ethernet is not noticeable. It can be even faster over network than running VDR in RPi. Overall, in _my_ VDR usage, RPI seems to perform just as well as my earlier dual-core i5. Except that RPi is invisible, silent, supports CEC, boots faster than TV, and HW decoder beats ffmpeg H.264 decoder in stability :).
Also I'm not sure how RPi will perform when fast forwarding HD recordings. This is another feature that I don't use, I skip instead of fast forward/backward.
One possible source of problems is audio decoding performance. I'm not sure if this affects DVB, but with (USB) BluRay I've noticed problems with very high bit rate video + AC3 decoding. But such high bitrates are not likely in DVB. New audio codecs are too much for RPi (DTS-HD, TrueHD - maybe even EAC3 ?). AC3 decoding uses ~ half of RPi CPU time. Here the additional CPU power of RPi 2 would be useful.
How many remote controller buttons do you typically get mapped via HDMI-CEC?
Probably not all VDR buttons. This depends on used TV and selected vdr-fbfe CEC device type. CEC defines more than enough buttons, but TV does not forward all buttons to external devices.
With Panasonic TV I have Menu, Recordings, menu navigation, channel switch, color keys, numbers and playback control keys. There are also some other keys I never use (Subtitle, Schedule, Channels, Timers, Power ?). Those all were mapped automatically, tweaking the settings would probably enable more keys.
I don't even care if all exotic shortcut keys are there; handling everything with single remote controller is so much simpler and makes VDR<->TV integration more seamless. Everything simply works without changing remote or remote controller mode/device/... Just like VDR was built in TV, not a separate feature.
CEC has also some other functions. VDR appears in connected devices menu and TV switches automatically to correct input when RPi is switched on. RPi could also power on/off TV, or the opposite (useless in my case because of RPi gets its power from TV and is switched on/off with TV).
You could probably also map TV volume control to VDR (but usually you want to do the opposite - use TV or AVR to control volume). Also VDR could control TV volume (when separate remote controller is used for VDR), but this is not implemented in vdr-fbfe.
CEC is nice addition even without RPi. Ex. Pulse Eight CEC adapter can be used with vdr-sxfe, but it costs about as much as RPi.
How about using vdr-fbfe to connect on a vdr instance running on the same RPi machine? Is it technically possible to for example pause a live SD TV stream and copy some files over the Ethernet at the same time? The single USB bus on the RPi would in that case need to handle the traffic of a hard disk adapter as well as the DVB dongle and the built-in Ethernet controller.
Probably possible, but slow. And I wouldn't except it to handle lot of parallel recordings either.
- Petri