-----Original message----- From: Holger Rusch holger@rusch.name Sent: Mon 08-12-2008 11:22 To: VDR Mailing List vdr@linuxtv.org; Subject: Re: [vdr] VDR with S2API (update)
Hi,
Klaus Schmidinger schrieb:
FF will die in a years or two (months?) i guess and vdr has no well integrated outputs.
Is there anything in the VDR plugin API that would prevent a plugin from implementing a suitable output device?
I guess not, but there are (from my view as user with knowladge how to compile and to fix compile-dependancies) it is (as i told) a real pain to get the things going.
Wether I use xineliboutput, xine or the reel eHD plugin, compilation/installation is rather straight forward or well documented on several Wiki's. At least, at the point of viewing my DVB-T, DVB-S or DVB-S2 broadcasts.
And yes this is not a problem of vdr.
The level to get everything going is high. ac3directout, softdevice, ffmpeg, xv-xserver, ... On the other side you pick an evil-windows system, and the output of the media data simple and easy.
I wish it was easy and simple. With Windows we have the DLL hell. And you don't want to know what I went through to get H264 decoding working on the GPU level in combination with Mediaportal. I tried several codecs, codec packs, bought codecs which should support, etc and still I had problems with H264 broadcasts (and no, I'm not talking MKV's or MP4's here) when watching NGC-HD.
I'm not talking days here. I'm talking weeks of struggeling to get it working. And now I've got it finally working, it seems that DISEQC support for my Hauppauge NOVA-HD-S2 is broken. Since August this year to be precise... Which other options do we have on Windows? The only ones I can think of are SageTV (expensive), MCE (expensive and doesn't support H264 broadcasts) and a bunch of other DVB viewing software which are unstable, or expensive, or un-usuable because they lack DISEQC support for my DVB-card or they are not user-friendly (read: limited WAF).
Since Januari this year I've tested several DVB software which would allow me to view H264 broadcasts. And up till today, only VDR allows this for me and is stable as hell. I can't remember when I last rebooted my HTPC or restarted VDR. That I needed to buy a eHD to get hardware acceleration, I don't care. For 605 Euro's I now have a HTPC which allows me to view DVB-S, DVB-S2 and DVB-T broadcasts and I can watch everything on the multimedia aspect (using XBMC).
It is a linux/system and not vdr problem, which does the recording really nice and good!
And to be honost, there aren't other options which are just as good or stable as VDR. I know this, I've spend almost 6 months to get my HTPC working with a high WAF. And this is *very* important if I wanted to change my software ;-)
Regards,
Niels Wagenaar