Dear VDR developers and fellow users,
you may have noticed my rather inappropriate thread at the linux-media mailing list... I'm trying to build a Linux HTPC for DVB-T2 and I'm struggling :-) I like the VDR project's philosophy / focus and I'd love to use the VDR as the software to run my HTPC. I understand that the primary output device with the VDR is a PCI DVB card with an integrated MPEG decoder - any alternative output plugins are in fact 3rd-party addons / stand-alone software projects. Well I'd like to try to use the IGP's decoding capabilities.
Where I am at:
At this stage I'm still playing with a cheap USB DVB-T2 dongle on borrowed or scrap hardware. Right now I have a Skylake-based machine, with Ubuntu 19.04 installed on some spinning rust. I'm compiling any parts that I need to on that same box. I have installed vdr-2.4.0 from the distro repo and I have also compiled my own from source, including all the development patches as of late April 2019. For the screen output, I'd like to use the "vaapidevice" plugin by rofafor/pesintta - compiled from source from this repository: https://github.com/pesintta/vdr-plugin-vaapidevice On the skylake machine, the vaapidevice output plugin seems to work.
I have a good quality DVB-T2 mux at my antenna input. The tuner is a re-labeled Mygica T230C2, sold under a local private brand = Linux driver cxusb, which I had to take from CrazyCat, because the mainline kernel doesn't support this latest Mygica HW revision. But the CrazyCat driver stack works fine for me, in Linux 5.0.10.
I'm still "not completely there yet". I'm facing the following issues:
The vaapidevice video playback "stutters". As if short (sub-second) sequences of the movie get repeated. (For comparison, VLC plays the stream just fine, smoothly.) I have a possible theory: I'm still trying this on the PC machine's built-in LCD, which likely runs at a 60Hz frame rate - while the HEVC material from DVB-T2 is nominally at 50p I guess (the old DVB-T was 50i). Maybe the VLC can somehow cope with that (perform rate conversion on the fly) but the vaapidevice plugin cannot. Maybe I should attach a TV as a second display and set the PC's HDMI frame refresh rate to 50 Hz.
Another issue is: how do I control the OSD on the vaapidevice output, if I only have a PC keyboard and mouse? I've found several introes (mostly copies of the VDR's MANUAL, I guess) that all speak about Lirc, how to configure the remote control buttons. Is there some way to control the OSD from PC keyboard? To be absolutely precise, I was even wondering if a miniature wireless PC keyboard (with radio transmission) wouldn't be more comfortable to use than the notoriously unreliable IR remotes :-)
Any help would be appreciated...
(ich verstehe auch Deutsch wenn das hilft)
Frank Rysanek