Michal Dobrzynski a ?crit :
> First off I need a disclaimer. This will be a bit of a rant which will
> hopefully let me vent some frustration and maybe if I'm lucky discover
> some useful information.
>
> --- Start of RANT ---
>
> If you care about how your home theater setup looks and how hard it is
> to maintain then having a PC as a central part of it is an AWFUL thing.
>
> Don't get me wrong, VDR itself is great but there's just no way to make
> a PC as practical as something like an XBox as the actual physical
> front-end. and believe me.. I've tried. I've tried so god damn hard that
> I'm close to losing my mind. I've sunk thousands of hard earned dollars
> (that I couldn't really afford but determination does awful things to
> your finances) into trying to make a PC integrate well into a home
> theater setup.
>
> Today I nearly threw the fucking PC through the wall in frustration. I
> recently purchased an XBox solely for use to playback xvid's and DVD's
> (integrating as many functions into one capable unit as possible GREATLY
> simplifies things for some users such as my parents) and with a remote
> control it cost me less than any single component I purchased for the PC
> (of which there were many).
>
> In my humble opinion maintaining a server which isn't trying to pretend
> to be a PVR that fits in well with home theater gear would be much, MUCH
> simpler and cheaper. And an XBox connected to a network with such a
> server on it would make for an extremely cheap and powerful front-end
> that doesn't require any thought to be put into hardware, just software.
>
> Using the XBox for watching DVD's and xvids has well as listening to
> music has been a revelation. It starts up quickly, it turns off with the
> press of a button. If anything locks up you can turn it off, then on and
> reload the interface faster than a PC would take just to turn off. If
> digital TV (including recording) could be made this easy and combined
> with the other features great features of XBMC then it would be
> unstoppable and only lacking in the HDTV department (next XBox for that
> I guess).
>
> This is an unplanned post and hasn't been fully thought out. It's just
> something I needed to get off my chest. Any pointers to things which
> aren't too complicated which could help me get what I'm after would also
> be appreciated.
>
> Also please not that there is no suggestion as to how to make a PC more
> user friendly in a home theater setup would be useful. The Xbox already
> does everything right in that respect at a fraction of the cost.
>
> --- End RANT ---
>
> To sum things up I'm not asking for VDR to change into something else
> (unless that's necessary for this sort of thing to even be possible but
> I doubt that). All I really want to know is if any work on an XBMC
> frontend to VDR ("My TV" anyone?) is being done by anyone anywhere. Is
> it possible? Why or why not?
>
> P.S. I suspect the primary problem is Microsoft and the proprietary
> nature of the XDK. This prevents the sort of people who would normally
> work on such things from even contemplating them. Is this a reasonable
> guess? Might this change once an open-source development environment is
> made available (work on such a thing is being done).
>
>
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>
Hello!
I've worked on Xbox/VDR thing ;)
And there is Two working way to watch TV from VDR with your Xbox!!
The first is to use an XBMC Python script + a modified mplayer.dll that
can handle the vtp protocol from streamdev
The second is a "mini" linux distribution (based on the Xebian distrib)
including VDR + streamdev-client + Lirc Support for the xbox remote unit
(support already included in the Xebian distrib) that allowed you to
have the full VDR function on your Xbox... The only "black point" for
now is the recording! As this distrib use a loopback file as the rootfs,
not to have to create an ext3 partition on your xbox harddisk and to
let you use Linux as an application, there is only 10Mo of free space!
You can find and try this tools here :
http://xmltv.free.fr
For the XMBC Python and mplayer dll :
http://xmltv.free.fr/vdr-x/
For the Linux + VDR "mini" distrib:
http://xmltv.free.fr/Xvdr/
Let me know for any bug (and I'm sure there are still some!)
Sad
