I would like to have a function to suspend VDR playback on my Raspberry Pi 2 or 3, so that I could occasionally use the screen for something else, such as a text console. Currently this is impossible because the video overlay would block the view on the text console layer.

I can think of several possible ways to achieve this.

(1) In the VDR core or in the video output plugin, monitor /sys/devices/virtual/tty/tty0/active for changes and automatically suspend and resume the output based on VDR is running on the active virtual console. The drawback would be: What if I detached the keyboard but forgot to switch the virtual console back, and another family member wants to watch TV?

(2) Add a special setting to the video output plugin (rpihddevice in my case), and activate it from the OSD using remote control.

(3) Change the VDR shutdown logic in some way, so that when the Power key is pressed, the audio and video output will be disabled immediately, as if the user had been inactive for a long time. The assumption here would be that a shutdown script or the existence of recording timers would prevent an actual shutdown. Years ago, I had written patches to do this. This would be easy to use from the remote control: Just press Power to suspend the output, and any other button to resume it.

When the output is suspended, ideally I would like the tuner device descriptor to be closed to save some power. It should only run when needed for recordings or for updating the EPG once in every few hours.

Marko