VDR Software Decoder Plugin
Historically, VDR required an AV711x based DVB PCI card to decode Audio and Video and to render it's OSD. Since these cards are quite expensive and old-fashioned now you can alternatively install the VDR Software Decoder Plugin which is even able to decode HDTV channels, and avoids the limitations and problems of the AV711x based PCI cards.
However, this plugin is not installed by default, so you have to expect some amount of work to get a software-decoder based VDR setup running.
As far I know there have been two alternatives: the Xine-Plugin and the softdevice plugin (is this correct?).
Sadly, no portable OpenGL-based renderer is known which would allow to build a STB with any cheap modern graphics card. (is this true, allows the xine-plugin OpenGL outputs?)
I can only speak about the softdevice plugin. It works very well and with any graphics card that supports Xvideo. No 3D-stuff required. For sound it uses Alsa but here I had to use Alsa's dmix plugin else the sound stutters.
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