DVBSky S952 Installation on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) HOWTO

DVBSky-S952The DVBSky S952 is a very popular Twin-DVB-S2 card on a budget which is often used in HTPCs or in Linux boxes with Kodi and/or VDR. Even Technotrend seams to produce this card as a de facto OEM version (TT S2-4200) now, which will be supported in kernel 4.7. Since Linux kernel 3.19 (e.g. used by Ubuntu 15.04 (Vivid Vervet)) the DVBSky S952 is also supported by the mainline v4l tree, so it should work right away after installation. This sounds good, but it has not to be like that. I’m using kernel 4.4.0 (16.04 (LTS); Xenial Xerus) and this card didn’t work for me out of the box. So what are the options to make this card work for You? Continue reading “DVBSky S952 Installation on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) HOWTO”

[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”

TechniSat Skystar2 – The Final Solution

I apologize profusely, but the title is ironic. There actually is no real solution, I took another DVB card. And this after more than 5 years of agony.

Tonight I had a dream. In this dream I had a time machine. Many people would definitely do a lot crazy and interesting things with a time machine. But I would travel back in time, to the day where I was about to come to a decision which DVB card to buy for my new Home Theater PC running with VDR, and I would prevent me buying the Skystar2 DVB card somehow. Continue reading “TechniSat Skystar2 – The Final Solution”

VDR-Xine Plugin now with VDPAU support (HOWTO)

[UPDATE]Read here, how to install VDR on Karmic Koala with Binary Packages.[/UPDATE] Reinhard Nissl managed to get his vdr-xine plugin going with Nvidia’s vdpau hardware acceleration support. What does mean HDTV and H.264 (mpeg4/avc) hardware acceleration is reality now on Linux! YES!
He instructed me on IRC#xine-vdpau and guided me through the installation process. He had enormous patience, and didn’t stop to help me, although my whole system is a real mess now, because of all my try-outs regarding xine, mlayer and vdpau compilations and installations. I still have difficulties with two channels. Some reported a flawless playback. Continue reading “VDR-Xine Plugin now with VDPAU support (HOWTO)”

xine-vdpau – the first contact

A little HOWTO on how to make VDR using the new VDPAU hardware acceleration…

[UPDATE]Read here, how to install VDR on Karmic Koala with Binary Packages.[/UPDATE] Like I wrote here, the xine developer team is working on an own implementation of Nvidia’s VDPAU video display driver, which is an H.264 hardware acceleration.

I’ve downloaded (checked out revision #106) the first alpha release here:

mkdir /usr/local/src/
svn co svn://jusst.de/xine-vdpau

Continue reading “xine-vdpau – the first contact”

My Media System (MMS) 1.1.0 RC9 released

My Media System (MMS), the light, fast and easy Open Source Media Center for Linux released yesterday in the version 1.1.0 RC9. This is going to be the last release candidate before final. If all goes as planed, around Christmas we’ll have finally a new stable MMS version. The last stable version was version 1.0.8.5, and was released on Monday 20. of August 2007. But 1.1.0 is different. Actually it’s almost a rewrite of the whole code.
This RC9 is a real milestone. Many new features and some real ugly bugs have been removed (Thanks Lorenzo). The removed bugs list is quite impressive anyway (see link below). Continue reading “My Media System (MMS) 1.1.0 RC9 released”

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)”