On Fri, 2005-03-04 at 12:57 +0100, Nicolas Huillard wrote: > Laurence Abbott a ?crit : > > How easy was it to get your Epia M1000 going with hardware MPEG > > decoding? Is it as simple as: boot, start vdr with xine plugins, start X > > sending out the S-video connector, start xine fullscreen? > > I start X using the startx command as a special-purpose user, then it > uses it's .xinitrc that run xine with all needed options (that's a > standalone STB, so no regular X on this). > Softdevice is a better alternative : no need to run a display client + > the vdr server : just launch vdr and you're done. No HW MPEG2 decoding, > though. I now have an Epia MII-12000 and I'm in the process of setting it up. I'm assuming that others on here have tried these things so I thought I'd save a bit of time and share the answers with others who may be interested (and Google didn't really give me any straight answers!). As I understand it, there are two methods of getting accelerated MPEG decoding with vdr: 1. Using X (as described above) with a kernel DRM module and a (patched?) version of xfree86 or xorg. Use xine output plugin. 2. DirectFB in conjunction with a kernel module. Use softdevice output plugin. Is either of these preferable? I would have thought the second because there is no overhead of running X as well but the post above says that DirectFB wouldn't use hardware decoding. Is this still correct? Or is DirectFB still very flakey? From what I've seen, there are about 3 different possible kernel modules, and the newest kernel patch I've found is for 2.6.8 (and I can't find a DVB kernel patch for that old a kernel!). As I say, I have yet to try any of the above and was after some pointers before I delve into the realms of testing different options! ;-) Cheers, Laz
