Hi,
I eagerly followed the recent thread about using VDR on an Epia-M board either with softdevice or xine plugins.
To sum things up:
# if you want a real settop-box w/o keyboard, mouse, .. you better use the the softdevice plugin, right?
# however, the softdevice plugin does not take use of the onbaord mpeg2 decoder. So running on a M6000, VDR will probably work in software decoding but it has a rather very high CPU usage.
right? :)
So, I certainly prefer the softdevice solution, but unless there is no real hardware decoding done (hope there will be some work in the future on this topic), I am going the "full-featured" way. I have an absolutely silent Epia SettopBox running for over a year now this way. Never change a running system, well, but yet, I want to get rid of that full-featured DVB-s card because : - It is worth a lot of money and thus I could sell it .. - I have another ff card but which has a broken tv-out. (we all know this nasty problem..)
After some short thinking, I came to the following idea: Is it possible to use my "broken" ff card along with the softdevice plugin (over DirectFB)? I mean, the ff card does provide hardware mpeg2 decoding and provides the picture over the v4l interface I think. Thus I could use a DirectFB tv app to display the video for example. Or am I wrong??
Now, could the softdevice plugin be modified in a way that it takes the decoded video from the ff card, instead of the ffmpeg software decoder, and then overlays the decoded video with the OSD (using DirectFB).
In short, can the softdevice plugin somehow take use of the onboared hw mpeg2 decoder of a ff card?
The advantages of this combination would be : - one can build a very low power settop box with enough spare resources for other background tasks - no limiting OSD memory as with the (unmodded) ff cards - high quality VGA-out instead of the ff cards integrated fbas-out (or RGB-scart), well RGB-scart gives very good quality, but a real VGA signal is probably the best if you connect a big LCD-TV.
So what do you think?
Best regards,
Thomas
Quoting Thomas Glomann mailinglists@glomann.de:
Hi,
I eagerly followed the recent thread about using VDR on an Epia-M board either with softdevice or xine plugins.
To sum things up:
# if you want a real settop-box w/o keyboard, mouse, .. you better use the the softdevice plugin, right?
# however, the softdevice plugin does not take use of the onbaord mpeg2 decoder. So running on a M6000, VDR will probably work in software decoding but it has a rather very high CPU usage.
right? :)
Depending of format to decode: yes.
Now, could the softdevice plugin be modified in a way that it takes the decoded video from the ff card, instead of the ffmpeg software decoder, and then overlays the decoded video with the OSD (using DirectFB).
In short, can the softdevice plugin somehow take use of the onboared hw mpeg2 decoder of a ff card?
There is to my knowledge _no_ way to get decoded data from any hardware decoder addon card, back to PC memory.
Stefan Lucke
Now, could the softdevice plugin be modified in a way that it takes the decoded video from the ff card, instead of the ffmpeg software decoder, and then overlays the decoded video with the OSD (using DirectFB).
In short, can the softdevice plugin somehow take use of the onboared hw mpeg2 decoder of a ff card?
There is to my knowledge _no_ way to get decoded data from any hardware decoder addon card, back to PC memory.
Stefan Lucke
well, i thought that the softdevice plugin could work as a 'regular' tv-application, that displays the decoded video via the v4l-interface, but still acts , in respect to VDR, as a DVB device. Softdevice wouldn't need to get the decoded video back into memory, it just would have to provide the OSD ontop of the v4l-video window. (you could compile DVB driver w/o OSD support, otherwise both-OSDs would be drawn (from ff card itself ))
do you understand what I have in mind? :)
regards,
Thomas
Thomas Glomann a écrit :
Now, could the softdevice plugin be modified in a way that it takes the decoded video from the ff card, instead of the ffmpeg software decoder, and then overlays the decoded video with the OSD (using DirectFB).
In short, can the softdevice plugin somehow take use of the onboared hw mpeg2 decoder of a ff card?
There is to my knowledge _no_ way to get decoded data from any hardware decoder addon card, back to PC memory.
well, i thought that the softdevice plugin could work as a 'regular' tv-application, that displays the decoded video via the v4l-interface, but still acts , in respect to VDR, as a DVB device. Softdevice wouldn't need to get the decoded video back into memory, it just would have to provide the OSD ontop of the v4l-video window. (you could compile DVB driver w/o OSD support, otherwise both-OSDs would be drawn (from ff card itself ))
do you understand what I have in mind? :)
I think the kvdr desktop app work the way you describe (except for OSD, which is handled by the FF card). There must a way for the v4l device to get back decoded frame in-memory, and copy it on-screen. I don't know how it works though.
But well : if you want hardware decoding and you have a M6000, you could just use the onboard CLE266 and get rid of your expensive broken FF card...
Which get to the lesson learned from this post : hardware decoding is a really popular subject with softdevice. To summarize : * hardware decoding can be done with CLE266/nVidia hardware support (libXvMC et al.), with DXR3, and the new idea is FF-card (I also have in stock an old Cinemaster card, similar to DXR3, but with a C-cube chip : support in Linux is unknown) * ffmpeg already have untested nVidia support in CVS * hardware decoding in the softdevice way should not mandate the use of full X11 * DirectFB could be used for XvMC-like interface, but maybe support is better hosted in ffmpeg (that way, various formats/codecs would be fed to softdevice, using opportunistic hardware decoding when available)
May I suggest that interested people brainstorm in various mailing-lists (ffmpeg, directfb, other I didn't think about) and report back on the softdevice mailing-list ?
Thomas Glomann wrote:
# however, the softdevice plugin does not take use of the onbaord mpeg2 decoder. So running on a M6000, VDR will probably work in software decoding
I posted the following on the softdevice list - I kinda assumed people here would also be on that list if interested in software decoding:
I'd like to report my success with softdevice on my Eden powered ME6000 mini-itx mainboard built on Debian.
The ME6000 is a 600MHz VIA Eden powered mainboard with CLE266 chipset. I was really interested to get the accellerated MPEG decoder going, because with a 600MHz processor I really didn't think it was going to work with a software decoder solution.
I'm using: Kernel 2.6.11 DirectFB-0.9.22 DFB++-0.9.22 VDR 1.3.23 Softdevice-0.1.1 Streamdev-0.3.3-pre3-geni
and this is configured as a diskless (Actually, I'm using a 16MB flash card to boot with the custom initrd image containing the USB WLAN driver and then mounting root on NFS) client with a USB Wireless NIC. Yes, I like pain, and this setup produced plenty.
DirectFB *does have* support for the MPEG decoder in the CLE266. It seems support for that function is growing rapidly now the VIA drivers are in the open.
Softdevice makefile was configured for DFB_SUPPORT, FB_SUPPORT (Not actually needed), and DEFINES += -DUSE_MMX. The output methods were built as a single library.
Note that PP_LIBAVCODEC and MMX2 are _not_enabled, they require instructions not available in the Eden processor.
Performance. On the whole, great. I'm using a 17inch LCD monitor for output. Sure, the quality doesn't come close to that produced on my main VDR box with FF DVB card and 32inch screen - if you look at the 17inch screen from one foot away you can see some (not too significant) MPEG artifacts inthe form of blockiness here and there - but from usual viewing position it's great. This system is in my main bedroom at the end of th bed.
The majority of channels are just fine, with maybe a few high bitrate ones that are too much for the decoding (or other) process. On these few, the A/V sync moves apart over a period of some secods and a brief <click> on the audio is heard and sync is restored. The process repeats.
On usual channels with plenty of movement, say MTV, processor utilisation is maybe 60-70% for the VDR and associated processes. On high quality channels it hits maybe 80% and having the OSD active may make the audio stutter slightly until it's cleared. This all gives a load average of around 1.0.
I _may_ be being unfair to softdevice, and it _could_ be the WLAN device located in a bad spot. I have moved it since I noticed the dodgy channel (I noticed it on BBC News 24 of all things) and I haven't noticed it since. Just managing expectations if anyone else was thinking of doing the same.
Conclusion. Compared to my previous installation with a DXR3 card? It's on a different planet! The DXR3 would crash at least once per viewing sesion, the OSD menus were slow and clunky, scrolling through the channel list quickly would almost certainly kill it.
With the above softdevice setup, the menus are, oh, so slinky and snappy, the remote is very responsive (as it should be) and the A/V quality excellent. Changing channels is somehow quicker too.
Steve
Hi Steve,
I'd like to report my success with softdevice on my Eden powered ME6000 mini-itx mainboard built on Debian.
I'm using: Kernel 2.6.11 DirectFB-0.9.22 DFB++-0.9.22 VDR 1.3.23 Softdevice-0.1.1 Streamdev-0.3.3-pre3-geni
Performance. On the whole, great.
Now that sounds interesting!
Which framebuffer driver do you use? From Nicolas and my tests, the driver from hacker2k has some problems with modes, but works with DirectFB and softdevice; the viaarena driver provides correct modes, but does not work with DirectFB (and therefore not with softdevice and vdr). In fact, the original driver does not even compile on kernel 2.6.11; Nicolas provided some patches here, but failed to get it working with DirectFB.
bye, Michael
Stefan Lucke wrote:
There is to my knowledge _no_ way to get decoded data from any hardware decoder addon card, back to PC memory.
Yes, there is. With FF card and mplayer for example: mplayer -tv driver=v4l2:outfmt=bgr32 tv://
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Anssi Hannula -
Michael Reinelt -
Nicolas Huillard -
Stefan Lucke -
Steve Brown -
Thomas Glomann