On Mon, Apr 26, 2010 at 12:42 PM, Martin Dauskardt md001@gmx.de wrote:

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The mpeg is not delivered by the broadcaster, it is generated by the encoder. The content of the header is a result of the V4L2_CID_MPEG_VIDEO_ASPECT setting done by the application.

If the aspect ratio flag is unreliable, again, you can always just use the resolution and calculate it.

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You _could_ write some functions to detect and remove letterboxing, though I don't know anyone motivated enough to actually do it.

The main goal of the pvrinput-plugin is to use the hardware encoder.I think it is a bad idea to do software-based on-the-fly-recoding.

If you want to limit the plugin to using only the hardware then I agree. However, if you want to provide capabilities beyond what the hardware is capable of then software is the only other place to do it. This is perfectly fine, although it probably means the user wasted his money on a hardware decoder if he's just going to do software decoding anyways. It doesn't hurt to put more consideration into what you want/need before pouring money into hardware. I know guys that threw a lot of money at hardware decoders only to replace them with cheap vdpau-capable video cards. To each his own I suppose. :)

Cheers

Except this is an input device, not an output device. It converts an analogue signal to mpeg2, as such, it needs to make guesses about what it's going to find..

If you want to limit the plugin to using only the hardware then I agree. However, if you want to provide capabilities beyond what the hardware is capable of then software is the only other place to do it. This is perfectly fine, although it probably means the user wasted his money on a hardware decoder if he's just going to do software decoding anyways. It doesn't hurt to put more consideration into what you want/need before pouring money into hardware. I know guys that threw a lot of money at hardware decoders only to replace them with cheap vdpau-capable video cards. To each his own I suppose. :)

I think Martin's talking about the PVR-500 encoding aspect, not hardware-vs-software decoders.

I have no qualms about recoding - my production box is dual core 64-bit and sits mostly idle anyway :)

I demand that Simon Baxter may or may not have written...

[snip]

I'm using vdr-xine, but as I have 2x DVB-C cards also there's only about 5 channels which I receive via the PVR-500. I could change the aspect in xine, but it would change it for ALL channels wouldn't it?

For DVB, http://xine-lib.alioth.debian.org/patches-1.1/AFD_support.patch may help. Otherwise, you're into auto-crop territory; the "expand" video output plugin will help.

[snip]