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

VDPAU was one of the big topics here on this blog for quite a while. Mplayer was well known to work together with VDPAU and Nvidia’s graphics cards >= 8xxx from almost the very beginning. But not Xine. The developers of Xine didn’t run mplayer’s approach, which was almost nothing else, but the code reuse of the code Nvidia itself published for their VDPAU driver.

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

[solved] No sound via stereo jack with Philips LCD-TV

I’ve recently bought a quite cheap LCD-TV from Philips. It’s an 42pfl5603d. The TV has FullHD (1920×1080) resolution and is 42″ in size. These are actually the only features I’ve been keen on.
The first one I sent back, because the TV set didn’t react either on remote or local (side panel) key presses. Amazon sent a new one after one week and I’ve started again to build my new HTPC. This time I was almost finished, MMS (My Media System) was already running, and sound was the only big thing I’ve been missing. Continue reading “[solved] No sound via stereo jack with Philips LCD-TV”

Mplayer-vdpau: Matroska (.mkv) and AVCHD (.mts) now both working

Nvidia released on 22th its new vdpau driver version 180.18, but not the corresponding mplayer-vdpau. One day later they also released a new mplayer-vdpau. The version 3263604.
I’ve reported a more or less working TwinView for vdpau version 180.18 on a x86_64 Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex), but today the situation look a bit different: Continue reading “Mplayer-vdpau: Matroska (.mkv) and AVCHD (.mts) now both working”

Ion – a tiny Media PC from Nvidia

First of all, the new thing about it isn’t its size, but its ability to work together with on Atom CPU from Intel. That’s not usual, since there’s been only one chip-set available so far, which is design to work with on Atom CPU, and that’s Intel’s 945GM. Now the GeForce 9400M chip-set will be able to cooperate with Intel’s low power and low buget CPU, the Atom. And you’ve read right. Continue reading “Ion – a tiny Media PC from Nvidia”

We're not there yet: xine-lib-1.2, VDPAU, and VDR 1.7.x (H.264/HDTV)

[UPDATE]Read here, how to install VDR on Karmic Koala with Binary Packages.[/UPDATE]
I’m running a patched VDR 1.7.0 with a SkyStar HD (with the Technotrend DVB S2 3200 driver), a svn xine-lib-1.2 and the H264 capable vdr-xine plugin fron Mr. Nissl. (See here the whole thread).

Actually there are two ways to run VDR 1.7 in HD mode. One with the native xine-lib-1.2, which uses ffmpeg behind the scenes, of course. Or one can use a special xine-plugin which is able to use CoreAVC’s CoreAVCDecoder.ax library. Continue reading “We're not there yet: xine-lib-1.2, VDPAU, and VDR 1.7.x (H.264/HDTV)”

HDTV (DVB-S2) with VDR 1.7.0 and a SkyStar HD on Ubuntu 8.10 x86_64 and CoreAVC (Intrepid Ibex)

First of all, there are good installation HOWTOs for Linux out there, which describe the set up of a HDTV capable VDR.
I used this installation HOWTO and a satellite dish with the appropriate feeds. (look for HDTV channels here).
I’ve played with VDR more than a half a year ago, and all was fine, but I’ve been on 32-bit environment (Ubuntu 7.10). Now I’ve tried to realize the same with Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) few days ago and basically failed, because no matter what I’ve tried, only one core of my four CPU cores have been used by xine. Ergo the the rate of the dropped frames was quite high. My CPU btw is: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Quad CPU Q6600 @ 2.40GHz Continue reading “HDTV (DVB-S2) with VDR 1.7.0 and a SkyStar HD on Ubuntu 8.10 x86_64 and CoreAVC (Intrepid Ibex)”