Hi All, I'm writing a tutorial on VDR for debian. To make the individual steps as small as possible, I would like to begin without any special hardware, just a normal PC. It turns out VDR refuses to run when no DVB card is found. Is there a configuration option somewhere to let VDR run without hardware? Can I create a dummy DVB device somehow? The guide (unfinished) is here: https://wiki.debian.org/VDR Best regards, Cedric My versions: VDR 1.7.28 Debian 7.2.0 Stable (installed today) The error in /var/log/syslog ... No DVB device found ERROR: invalid primary device number: 1 ERROR: no primary device found = using first device! ERROR: invalid primary device number: 1 ... exiting, exit code 2 runvdr: stopping after fatal fail (vdr: no primary device found - using first device!)
----Origineel Bericht---- Van : cedric.dewijs@telfort.nl Datum : 28/11/2013 22:17 Aan : vdr@linuxtv.org Onderwerp : [vdr] start VDR without hardware for test and tutorial Hi All, I'm writing a tutorial on VDR for debian. To make the individual steps as small as possible, I would like to begin without any special hardware, just a normal PC. It turns out VDR refuses to run when no DVB card is found. Is there a configuration option somewhere to let VDR run without hardware? Can I create a dummy DVB device somehow? The guide (unfinished) is here: https://wiki.debian.org/VDR Best regards, Cedric My versions: VDR 1.7.28 Debian 7.2.0 Stable (installed today) The error in /var/log/syslog ... No DVB device found ERROR: invalid primary device number: 1 ERROR: no primary device found = using first device! ERROR: invalid primary device number: 1 ... exiting, exit code 2 runvdr: stopping after fatal fail (vdr: no primary device found - using first device!) Hi All, For now I have stated in the tutorial it's not possible to start VDR without hardware. In the meantime, I have found virtualDVB. It looks like you can feed it video from VLC, and it then presents itself as a DVB device. https://launchpad.net/virtual-dvb Does anybody has experience with this solution? Best regards, Cedric
Have you tried patching VDR so it doesn't abort if no dvb device is found? I'm not sure what side-effects, if any, there may be by doing so.
Btw, I also found it annoying VDR wouldn't start without a dvb device. A long time ago I had a dvb card die but i had a lot of unwatched recordings so I figured I would just watch those until my new dvb card came in. Nope! Pretty lame when you run VDR on a dedicated box with no keyboard attached and no easy way to get that box to play your recordings. IMO VDR should start regardless. What good is there in denying the user access to his recordings and plugins? Obviously no dvb device means no live tv, but VDR does/can do a lot more than that.
Thank you for this. I have installed xineliboutput on my debian installation, but that does not auto-install vdr-plugin-xineliboutput. I have installed vdr-plugin-xineliboutput, and now VDR happily runs without any hardware. I have updated my manual to reflect this. https://wiki.debian.org/VDR
Sorry for my choose of words in my previous e-mail, I did not intent to insult anyone, but I was a bit disappointed.
Best regards, Cedric
VDR requires an output device to start. But as already pointed out this doesn't necessarily have to be real hardware but could also be a plugin.
However, instead of using (and recommending) such a heavy-scale (from dependency and complexity perspective) plugin like xineliboutput, how about the dummydevice-plugin as output plugin? http://phivdr.dyndns.org/vdr/vdr-dummydevice/ or even the dynamite-plugin: http://projects.vdr-developer.org/projects/show/plg-dynamite which starts as placeholder and enables later configuration of actual DVB devices.
Best regards, Christian
Am 28.11.13 22:17, schrieb cedric.dewijs@telfort.nl:> It turns out VDR refuses to run when no DVB card is found. Is there a
configuration option somewhere to let VDR run without hardware? Can I create a dummy DVB device somehow?
That's a good suggestion, I didn't know it existed.
I will mention it as an alternative to xineliboutput. Personally I want to use xineliboutput because I'm building a PC that drives my TV via HDMI, but dummydevice-plugin is indeed useful if you are building a headless server.
Having said that, debian does not have vdr-dummydevice nor dynamite in their repositories yet, If I figure out how, I will suggest it.
Best regards, and thanks for thinking with me, Cedric
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cedric.dewijs＠telfort.nl -
Christian Tramnitz -
Helmut Auer -
VDR User