Hello everyone, I have a small update on how far I got on my noob quest. As I've already explained, I have a proven and good quality T2 HEVC signal source = a multiplex transmitted from a nearby tower, reaching CNR values up to 35 dB. Today I got myself some hardware with a mobile Skylake i5 and plugged my boot drive with Ubuntu Disco into that box. I'm still amazed at how things tend to work "out of the box" in Linux. I had to smile at how the Ubuntu, moved from a 65nm C2D, booted on a Skylake without any objections :-) So I now have a working VAAPI. And a friend explained to me how to tune into a DVB-T2 mux and then select programs in VLC. The vainfo utility is telling me that HEVC decoding is supported by the hardware, and indeed VLC seems to call VAAPI for the HEVC streams, including one or two freeview T2 programs that are broadcast in full HD. The playback runs at under 10% CPU consumption. Out of all the "players" that I have tried so far, VLC is the most stable and smooth. Almost perfect - except that it's still basically a "desktop app". I need the user interface to feel like a stupid TV set with PVR capabilities = I'm aiming for the VDR. I've got a couple noob questions that I plan to ask at the VDR mailing list. If I tune into the mux and select a particular program using the command-line tool "dvbv5-zap -r", I can try to launch some independent players on /dev/dvb/adapter0/dvr0 . The ffplay does accept that, but does not use the vaapi, plays the stream in software, and freezes in a few seconds or minutes, depending to some degree on what material I pipe into it (codec and resolution and maybe some encoder details that I do not know.) The Mplayer does not even open a video window - just stays stuck in the command line. Stand-alone Xine doesn't work this way, nor does smplayer. With the VDR, during my early steps I was using the vdr-xine output plugin. With that plugin, Xine displays DVB-T MPEG2 encoded streams (including the VDR GUI), but fails to display DVB-T2 HEVC encoded programs... curiously, the GUI is there, but says "no signal". But, now with VAAPI available and working, the "vaapidevice" VDR output plugin has started to work. And it does play back a T2 stream - apparently starts with a program preset remembered from Xine (I don't have another explanation why it would start at preset 50). I have yet to find out how to control it from keyboard :-) and I have some noob homework to do on the IR remote. Curiously, the video playback in VDR+vaapidevice is "stuttering". As if short (sub-second) sequences of the movie get repeated. I have a possible theory: I'm still trying this on the PC machine's built-in LCD, which likely runs at a 60Hz frame rate - while the HEVC material from DVB-T2 is nominally at 50p I guess (the old DVB-T was 50i). Maybe the VLC can somehow cope with that (perform rate conversion on the fly) but the vaapidevice pluging cannot. Maybe I should attach a TV as a second display and set the PC's HDMI frame refresh rate to 50 Hz. Enough of my scribbling for today. Any comments welcome. Frank
