DXR3-plugin for VDR

On this page you can find the latest release of the DXR3-plugin for VDR, the great digital Video Disk Recorder from Klaus Schmidinger.

VDRs' main advantage is that it could be fully controlled via OnScreen Display (OSD) and remote control which gives you all to build a complete and powerful video disc recorder. Normaly this needs at least one DVB-s card with an MPEG-Decoder and TV-Out (e.g. Hauppage Nexus) which costs at least 200,- EUR (and not much cheaper at ebay).
The DXR3/Hollywood+ card is a MPEG decoder card with an execellent TV-Out and good linux support (although not by the manufacturer) which you can find on ebay for about 10 - 40 EUR.
The idea of replacing the DVB-s card by a low-buget DVB NOVA and a DXR3/Hollywood+ card (MPEG-Decoder) was born. Such a system would be cheaper and allows timeshifting by default (although the new DVB driver seems to break the limitation of non-timeshifting for one DVB-s card).

Prerequisites

1. Make sure your DXR3 card is running under linux. For more information look at the DXR3-homepage.
2. Install a VDR developer version.
3. The plugin needs the libavcodec library from ffmpeg. The plugin has been successfully tested with ffmpeg version 0.4.6.
   By default the ffmpeg package should be installed in parallel to the VDR and DVB directory (could be changed in the plugin-Makefile).
   

Installation

1. Get the latest version from this side
2. Unpack the package into "PLUGINS/SRC" directory
3. Make a symbolic link to this dxr3-plugin (ln -s vdr_dxr3_x.x.x dxr3)
4. Call "make plugins" in the VDR root directory
5. Make sure your DXR3 driver modules are loaded and ready to run
6. Start VDR with "vdr -Pdxr3"

Latest version

vdr-dxr3-0.2.2.tgz

Changes since 0.2.1

• Some initialization fixes. Thanks to Jon Burgess.
• Added patch from Teemu Rantanen to emergency exit if the plugin is not able to recover from dxr3 driver crash.
• Fixed some osd problems (Elchi, Games, etc.).
• Changed Makefile to support vdr-1.3.0.

Known Bugs and Limitations

• Switching between digital pcm audio and ac3 audio seems to be only possible after reloading the microcode to the dxr3 (approximately 2 sec no video/audio)
• Slow-motion during replay doesn't work
• NTSC material doesn't work yet
• No live stream when using mp3 plugin. It's not possible to display the video stream because we get no stream (and actually we don't want an additional video stream :-)
• Between channel switches we need to close the video device which leads to a small flickering. This seems to increase the reliability of the osd and it makes it possible to display mpeg1 streams. It would be possible to add a configuration parameter to enable and disable (mpeg1 is then not possible anymore) this behaviour ... don't  hesitate to contact us if you want that
• Officially we only support CPUs faster than AMD K6 II 350 (because we don't have a slower CPU)
  - If it works with slower CPUs ... great
  - If you have a fix to increase performance ... great, just send us the fix
  - If you assume that vdr is the limiting element please contact the vdr developer

Planned features for next releases (coming soon)

• Handling for unrecoverable dxr3 crash
• Support for analog plugin
• Support for dvd subtitles
• Experimental WSS support (integration of patch received from Seppo Ingalsuo ... sorry haven't found the time so far)
• OSD while displaying mpeg1 streams

Full History

Authors

Feedback

Please report any new problems to

OSD	Stefan Schlünß (dxr3_osd@schluenss.de)
Audio/Video	Kai Möller (dxr3_av@schluenss.de)

Last modified 04/01/2004