Hi Johan,

You have a good approach. I am using the vdr-ui frontend right now which uses the TS from streamdev to feed the mono player. I managed to have a compiled version of the xine lib but I failed to use it due to deep code cutting to get it running. As far as I have understood you succeed to have xine library available on your PCH. Making an adaptation of the OSD layer should then not be a big issue. The complexity will reside in the video stream handling as you have already mentioned. Digging into other projects or starting a discussion in the networkedmediatank can bring a lot of of knowledge here.

This project sounds very interesting to me. If you need some help, I would be pleased to provide my support.

Regards,

Alex

Johan Andersson wrote:

I need some advise on routes to look into on the subject.

First, thank you Klaus and all for a great PVR. I have tried a lot of others like Myth, MediaPortal, GBPVR etc, but the silent menusystems are hopelessly inferior to having all menus on OSD. Me and my family have used VDR for 2+ years now and we are all happy with it.

I am not bleeding edge VDR with DVB-T in Sweden being SDTV and we have only one TV-set although I'm running client/server xineliboutpout with a dedicated frontend machine.

I bought myself a PCH with the idea of using it instead of my PC VDR frontend.

With some effort and googling I got xineliboutputs vdr-fbfe (with xinelib et.al) cross compiled and runnable on the PCH.

However AFAIK, the directfb usage in xinelib is based on pixelmaps written to a dfb surface, all mpeg decode is done in software, this is suboptimal on the PCH along with sound being a problem. Running vdr-fbfe on PCH says 'DFBGetSurface() not supported' and exits.

It seems people have looked into streamdev instead. I like my VDR OSD though on the TV-set, am I wrong in believing that is a nono with streamdev?

Now PCH has an 'IAdvancedMediaProvider' extension to directfb seemingly allowing the mpeg-stream to be sent directly to the hardware, thereby including both video and audio, it is sadly not fully documented in the headers released by Syabas...

The most promising option as I see it is to slash down vdr-fbfe to only display the 'osd_command' data on a PCH DFB layer without video capability and stream 'normally' to PCH using ideally the xineliboutputs servers ability to supply for example an http stream. The hope being that the 'vdr-fbfe' application can access directfb concurrently and have the OSD displayed ontop of the video layer.

Before I dig deeper into this I would like to ask the community what has been tried and what routes do you see as most viable?

I know of some other PCH frontend software for GBPVR Myth, ie vomp and mvcpmx(?) but they seem to return me to the world of silent menus, not a place I want to be.

/Johan