[HOWTO] HDTV with Karmic Koala (Ubuntu 9.10) using VDR, Xine or Xineliboutput

Posted on by acme

Launching
You can start your clients (vdr-sxfe or xine) with Gnome or KDE3 or 4, but:
In most cases a compositing manager such as Metacity, KWin or Compiz is used in the background, even without your knowledge. If you can perform such nifty tricks like rotating cubes and wobbling windows, than you certainly are using a compositing manager, and this is most likely a problem if you want to use your VDR clients here.
In my case, I had heavy glitches (complete system freezes) using a KDE4.3.2, KWin 4.3.2 and Qt: 4.5.2. Especially using two screens with Xinerama, or Nvidia calls it Twin View will most likely not work properly. Tearing will occur, and on PAL systems either way you will definitely suffer from jitter, because the lowest frequency I can choose for my LCD panels is 60Hz and not 50Hz.
I strongly recommend to shut down your windows manager and use xinit instead. This ain’t rocket science, and is pretty easy. The launching examples below only requires a xinit -e, followed by the rest of the code. So depending on your window manager a

/etc/initd.d/kdm stop

or an

/etc/init.d/gdm stop

has to be performed before you can start the VDR client.
Start VDR with

/etc/init.d/vdr start

or

service vdr start

Starting with xineliboutput with vdr-sxfe

  • vdr-sxfe xvdr+tcp://server:37890  --post tvtime:method=use_vo_driver --lirc --audio=auto --fullscreen --video=vdpau

    • where server is the IP or hostname of your server.

Starting with Xine

  • xine -f -V vdpau --post vdr --post vdr_video --post vdr_audio --aspect-ratio=anamorphic --verbose=2 --no-logo --no-splash "netvdr://server#demux:mpeg_pes" -A alsa

    • where server is the IP or hostname of your server.

HDTV channels.conf
In Germany the situation with HDTV resolution is like this: The are four FTA channels available, which are sending their content in 720p, which means 50 frames a second with 720 lines in y, but only 1280 in x. This is good for motion, such as football or stuff, but it has less details. It has only four times more details in comparison to PAL or NTSC.
These channels are:
720p channels

  • Das Erste HD
  • ZDF HD
  • arte HD
  • Einsfestival HD

1080p is only used by 3 channels, and has six times the information of a PAL/NTSC picture. This is good for very detailed scenes, but fast motion looks poor because of the interlaced video frame. Only 540 lines in y are send each 1/50 sec. So every 1/25 sec we do have 1080 lines in y, but this flickers. Here are atm available 1080i FTA channels:
1080i channels

  • ANIXE HD
  • Servus Tv HD
  • ASTRA HD (Promo)

HDTV channels.conf from 23/Oct/2009
I do also receive the satellites Amos, Sirius and Hotbird, but they don’t offer any FTA HDTV channel, neither is any non-German FTA HDTV channels available atm. Here’s my current scan result:

Das Erste HD;ARD:11361:hC23M5O35S1:S19.2E:22000:6010=27:6020=deu;6022=deu:6030:0:11100:1:1011:0
ZDF HD;ZDFvision:11361:hC23M5O35S1:S19.2E:22000:6110=27:6120=deu;6122=deu:6130:0:11110:1:1011:0
arte HD;ZDFvision:11361:hC23M5O35S1:S19.2E:22000:6210=27:6221=deu,6222=fra;6220=deu:6230:0:11120:1:1011:0
Einsfestival HD;ARD:12421:hC34M2O0S0:S19.2E:27500:1601=27:1602=deu;1606=deu:0:0:28396:1:1201:0
ANIXE HD;BetaDigital:10832:hC23M5O35S1:S19.2E:22000:767=27:0;771=deu:0:0:61202:1:1057:0
Servus TV HD;ORF:11302:hC23M5O35S1:S19.2E:22000:3583=27:3584=deu,3585=deu;3587=deu:0:0:4913:1:1007:0
ASTRA HD;BetaDigital:10832:hC23M5O35S1:S19.2E:22000:1023=27:0;1027=deu:0:0:61203:1:1057:0

Nevertheless here’s my scan command for all satellites:

w_scan -fs -sS19E2 -o7 -D0c >  ./4-satellites-channels.conf
w_scan -fs -sS4E8  -o7 -D1c >> ./4-satellites-channels.conf
w_scan -fs -sS13E0 -o7 -D2c >> ./4-satellites-channels.conf
w_scan -fs -sS4W0  -o7 -D3c >> ./4-satellites-channels.conf

You’ll need the w-scan tool for it. (aptitude install w-scan)
Read on the next page about Tips, Known Issues, Link.

Pages: 1 2 3 4

11 thoughts on “[HOWTO] HDTV with Karmic Koala (Ubuntu 9.10) using VDR, Xine or Xineliboutput”

  1. Hello acmelab68,
    Really nice Howto. I used it myself and it works great. Could you please refresh the Repositorys cause Hotzenplotz merged his Repositorys with the-vdr-team together these one are depreciated.

  3. Hello,

    I added each ppa you described, but I get always these messages:

    Konnte kein Paket finden, dessen Name oder Beschreibung auf »libxine1-vdpau-plugins« passt.
    Konnte kein Paket finden, dessen Name oder Beschreibung auf »nvidia-190-libvdpau« passt.
    Konnte kein Paket finden, dessen Name oder Beschreibung auf »libxine1-vdpau-plugins« passt.
    Konnte kein Paket finden, dessen Name oder Beschreibung auf »nvidia-190-libvdpau« passt.

    These packages couldn’t be found. What can I do?

  4. @herman
    1) You’ve got to use now the repo from the vdr-team, like Diable mentioned. Look up here the repo you are interested in: http://www.henningpingel.de/vdrstuff/vdr_trendy_features_matrix.html

    2) If you should decide to take https://launchpad.net/~the-vdr-team/+archive/vdr-ubuntu-karmic , then there won’t be libxine1 any longer. It’s libxine2. And libvdpau is 195+ meanwhile.

    Simply perform a
    aptitude search libxine
    aptitude search libvdpau

    and install the appropriate packages.

    Good Luck

  6. @herman
    you are right. One cannot mix the versions of libxine – but the dependencies should be resolved automatically – if I remember correctly.

  7. hi
    thanz for HOWTO
    I received this error
    Couldn’t find any package whose name or description matched “libxine1-vdpau-plugins”
    Couldn’t find any package whose name or description matched “libxine1-vdpau-plugins”
    which repo should I use?

  9. I’m using on Lucid this PPA-repo:
    deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/yavdr/testing-vdr/ubuntu lucid main
    and this is what dpkg -l | grep yavdr returns:

    root@server:~# dpkg -l | grep yavdr
ii  liblircclient-dev                    0.8.6-0yavdr6                                    infra-red remote control support - client library development fi
ii  liblircclient0                       0.8.6-0yavdr6                                    infra-red remote control support - client library
ii  libxine-dev                          1.2.0~hg20100615-0yavdr1                         the xine video player library, development packages
ii  libxine1-xvdr                        1.0.6+cvs20100602.1715-2yavdr1                   Xine input plugin for vdr-plugin-xineliboutput streams
ii  libxine2                             1.2.0~hg20100615-0yavdr1                         the xine video/media player library, binary files
ii  lirc                                 0.8.6-0yavdr6                                    infra-red remote control support
ii  vdr                                  1.7.14-8yavdr1                                   Video Disk Recorder for DVB cards
ii  vdr-dev                              1.7.14-8yavdr1                                   Video Disk Recorder for DVB cards
rc  vdr-plugin-burn                      0.1.0~pre22-ff1-11yavdr1                         Plugin for vdr that implements dvd conversion and writing
ii  vdr-plugin-femon                     1.7.7-3yavdr1                                    DVB frontend status monitor plugin for VDR
ii  vdr-plugin-fritzbox                  1.3.3-0yavdr1                                    VDR plugin to access certain functions of an AVM Fritz!Box
ii  vdr-plugin-skinenigmang              0.1.1-2yavdr1                                    Skin plugin for VDR
ii  vdr-plugin-skinsoppalusikka          1.7.1-3yavdr1                                    Skin plugin for vdr
ii  vdr-plugin-text2skin                 1.3.1-0yavdr1                                    Plugin to vdr that loads and views skins
rc  vdr-plugin-xine                      0.9.3-7yavdr1                                    Plugin for "software only" playback using xine
ii  vdr-plugin-xineliboutput             1.0.6+cvs20100602.1715-2yavdr1                   VDR plugin for Xine based sofdevice frontends
ii  vdr-plugin-yaepghd                   0.0.2~beta-1yavdr2                               Rewrite for Yaepg
ii  vdr-skin-anthra-1920-os              080510-0yavdr1                                   Anthra 1920-overscan Skin for VDR's text2skin plugin
ii  vdr-skin-blackandblue-os             0.0.1-2yavdr1                                    Black and Blue Overscan Skin for VDR's text2skin plugin
ii  vdradmin-am                          3.6.7-1yavdr2                                    Web-based administration tool for vdr
ii  xineliboutput-sxfe                   1.0.6+cvs20100602.1715-2yavdr1                   Remote X-Server frontend for vdr-plugin-xineliboutput

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