VDR Portal

I've been a vdr user since ~2005, so about 6 years. For all of that I've used a generic build of Fedora with VDR installed (along with a raft of plugins and XMBC).

With the supposed simplicity of yavdr, built in yavdrweb, VDR Live and nvidia vdpau support, I thought I'd give yavdr a go.

First impressions.
* installation on new hardware (cheap motherboard, HDMI card etc) was very straightforward.
* no problems (apart from getting used to Ubuntu, having come from Fedora!) getting the basic 3x IPTV channels up and working
* pretty quickly had all my old VDR recordings working, remote control (through an Android VDR app), music, picture and video collections and DVD playing
* the web portal provides easy access to configure most basic things; hdmi audio, front end selection, remote control, streaming etc
* the "templates" you have to use to update .conf files, grub files etc took some getting used to - but it's a pretty clean way of managing your customizations
* out-of-the-box the vdpau runs great. CPU is at 0.5%, where my native VDR system ran at 15-20% cpu

Things still to work out how to do
* get remote keys working on xbmc

Things still causing frustration!!
* I have some customizations I need on VDR source code - how do I a)download vdr sources b)integrated these into yavdr
* it seems every time I try and do some fairly normal Ubuntu tasks, like updating packages, kernels etc, I break yavdr and need to re-install yavdr


any other english people out there going through the same challenges as me?

Quoted from "hepi"

Welcome!

Regarding "Customizations I need on VDR source code": yaVDR is already shipping with a lot of patches that add a lot of features that are not part of the vanilla VDR core. You should evaluate if it is really necessary to recompile VDR. There is a pretty good chance that there already is a much easier solution for the problem you are trying to solve without the need to patch VDR. The only exceptions I can think of ATM would be some ATSC EPG specialties. We had a discussion a while ago with a user who wanted to use an ATSC EPG patch. Has your patch publicly been discussed on the vdr mailing list?

However, you can get all source packages of all our binary packages from Launchpad in the way it always works on Debian/Ubuntu:

	Source code
1	apt-get source vdr

Be aware of the fact that you often need to recompile all VDR plugins used after patching the VDR package.

Cheers,
hepi

Thanks - I'll keep this in mind. My customisations are to do with static PCIDs - which I may be able to work around. Won't be sure until I can test this, which won't be for a while.

Quoted from "gda"

Quoted from "baxternz"

Things still causing frustration!!
* it seems every time I try and do some fairly normal Ubuntu tasks, like updating packages, kernels etc, I break yavdr and need to re-install yavdr

This is absolutely not normal. Explain what you are doing and what messages you get.

Gerald

OK, so some things I broke:
1) Wasn't sure what would happen, but I did the "oneiric" release update as prompted to so from a console login. This updated loads of stuff, and it wouldn't boot after that. Screwed grub up, put all current kernels into a "previous kernels" sub-dir, and only offered linux-3.0.0.0. Won't do that again!
2) Did a re-install "over the top" of this partition. Which kind of worked, but grub still had to be manipulated to not have a sub-dir of previous kernels.
3) Tried to clean up older kernel versions (using dpkg remove), but managed to delete 2.6.38-13. Tried to boot to 2.6.38.12, but the window manager wouldn't start. VDR started in the background, but couldn't attach a frontend - and the syslog messages said "could not connect to 0:0".
Have no idea what window manager is running (not fluxbox, which I'm used to??) so gave up and did a complete clean install.
4) I used to run VDR in a "screen" session so I could "screen -x" in and press keys etc to control VDR. This also let me see the console messages, rather than having to look in /var/log/messages or /var/log/syslog. Can this still be achieved in yavdr? Where is the VDR console now and can it be accessed directly?

I'll keep learning and persevere with yaVDR - the benefits seem to outweigh the "learning curve"!

Further milestone - ATSC OTA working "out of the box" on yavdr-0.4.0. That was easy!

Next - getting EPG working on ATSC OTA....

OK - I can't see any easy way to get epg working

can't get XmltvGUI working

Don't really want to use XTVD-Tools - as getting info out of mysql will be somewhat involved.

Is there an easy way to get Schedules Direct integrated into yavdr??

Yes, but I don't get any atsc events for epg

Found an easier way


1) created an account on schedulesdirect.org
2) downloaded xmltv
3) tv_grab_na_dd --days 14 --output /srv/video/epg_schedules_direct.xml
4) xmltv2vdr.pl -v -x /srv/video/epg_schedules_direct.xml -c channels.conf

all too easy!

Seems to me there must have already been a plugin for importing .xml epg?

Does anyone know of one?

OK, so yavdr "nooobie" question...

As this plugin isn't in the yavdr list of available plugins, how do I add it to my yavdr-0.4.0 setup?

-install vdr sources? Recompile ALL other installed plugins?


Thanks