On Fri, 05 Jun 2009 09:35:19 +0200 Nicolas Huillard nicolas@huillard.net wrote:
Gerald Dachs a écrit :
VDR User schrieb:
VDR + hdtv has been pretty stable for me for some time now. The few problems I ran into (with VDPAU) were quickly fixed by the xine-vdpau devs. I'm not the only one either, I know a bunch of guys doing the same. It's a highly discussed topic and I'm honestly surprised to hear someone suggest it's in an unstable/crashing/unusable state. My experience has been basically the opposite of that. I would recommend you make sure to have a nice good signal, proper configurations, etc.
I agree with VDR User, I use it for months now without problems.
Could you please both detail a bit the DVB sources, software versions, plugins, patches, etc. related to HD, that you actually use now ? (DVB-T, DVB-S or S2, DVB kernel patches, VDR core, xineliboutput or xine plugin, xinelib patches...)
I think it would also help if we could reach an agreement over the terms "stable" and "good quality" and "everything is working" because they are highly subjective.
For me a "stable" configuration of vdr is one where (I have a dual ff card setup at the moment): - I can record two streams from two different transponders and watch a third one (either from one of the two transponders, a recorded one, or with mplayer) without pixelation, without skips and with no audio/video desyncing - The osd is fast and clear - Zapping from one channel to another takes less then .5 seconds - everything is controlled from the remote
"good quality" in an SD environment means that I am used to the video quality of the s-video output of the FF card to a Mitsubishi VPR with a 100" screen (it isn't blue-ray I know, but except for the resolution, the output quality is really exceptional)
"everything is working" means that I have a computer that I use as an stb (no keyboard, no mouse, no video) and that I can power up with my remote, that is completely controlled via my remote, where vdr is able to autostart and record on its own, where I can burn shows either to DVD or Xvid files, where I can play every media file mplayer can, with PCM or AC3 audio depending on the media, with subtitles in mplayer media, and the occasional streaming to a vlc client around the house
I do have an eHd card I'm playing with, together with an s2-3200 card on a separate machine, I haven't played with xine-vdpau yet, and until I can find a video card that will be able to run vdpau with < 10W consumption I don't think I will be tempted to try it ... we'll see
At the moment I have a running system with one s2-3200, vdr1.7.5, extensions patch, reelbox3, filebrowser,xinemediaplayer (took me about a weekend of fiddling with patches, drivers, small corrections to the reel code, lurking the german boards and swearing, lots of swearing) and some other plugins, hd output on the eHd is really nice, I am not so happy with the quality of SD output either at native resolution or scaled to 1080i .... the non scaled quality is in my opinion much worse than what I have on my FF card, and the scaled quality depends on the media, but it is generally bad, in my opinion.
From what I have understood lurking on the German folders (I'm italian so German is a no-no for me) low sd quality on the ehd is a common complaint from eHd users, and one that won't probably be tackled from Reel since apparently it is a hardware/firmware limitation of the chip used on the eHd and production and support for the this chip has been terminated from the original manufacturer Also, it doesn't look like there will be an 'Oliver Endriss' that takes the situation in hand like it happened with the FF cards firmware and releases updates even if the original chip developer has ceased support. (on the other hand, since I can understand about one word in ten of german and usually use google translator to understand the meaning of the posts, it may be that sd quality output can be fine-tuned to FF quality and I simply don't know how)
This means that if the situation doesn't change (reel multimedia gets the source code for the embedded chip in the eHd and tries to improve on it) the next version of the eHd won't use the same chip/there won't be and eHd anymore, and sd quality won't improve, unless Reel finds a way to improve it using other methods.
Since here in Italy the selection of HD channels not related to football is non-existent (and I'm not interested in football), there has been no incentive for me (so far) to move from a "stable", "good quality" and "working" sd solution to an equivalent hd one with lower quality sd.
Also, I am not using file sharing programs to download hd content and I am not ready to tackle blu-ray yet .
Maybe there is an english howto somewhere ?
Hmm, not that I'm aware of, the most reliable howto is on the german VDR wiki: http://www.vdr-wiki.de/wiki/index.php/OpenSUSE_VDR_DVB-S2_-_Teil2.1:_eHD#Vor...
this covers the ehd and vdr basic install, while for the xinemediaplayer (that requires you to compile a custom version of xine-lib and the xine-hde plugin) I had to delve into the german board and improvise and do some manual changes in order for all the plugins to compile/run correctly on my setup (ubuntu 9.04 32bit) .... from what I understand depending on the host system and the architecture and gcc version and a couple other factors the plugins should compile with minimal adjustments/force you to manually correct compilation errors (that was my case)
It would be great if someone that has a "stable, good quality and working" eHd setup that also outputs "good quality" sd video could step up and point us non german speakers to some documentation/thread (even german would do) and/or patches and/or suggestions about how to obtain good results with the eHd
Regards
Mattia
---MR.---