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
