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Last Sanday Klaus Schmidinger has announced the release of VDR developer version 1.7.15. AS usual there is a lot of bugfixes and improvements such support of a non-standard mode used by North American providers, fixing of a problem with external Dolby Digital processing and adding of full handling of the stream types of Dolby Digital pids, adding new and updating existing OSD texts.

yaVDR which mixes XBMC and VDR in its media distribution will stay with version 1.7.14 for a while. But the package for the 1.7.15 should appear in its PPA soon.

Next developer version of popular Linux-based software to organize PVR was released recently for testing. There is mostly bug fixing in the changelog. Just a few new languages were added to the user interface.

I’d like to remind you that main purpose of the 1.7.x branch is adding support of HDTV and DVB-S2. So, if you’re planing to watch satellite or terrestrial HD channels the VDR 1.7.x should suit you. Regardless of instable a lot of people use that version on their HTPC. Sure you should be ready to solve some problems by yourself or with VDR community.

Klaus Schmidinger released today next developer version of VDR 1.7.7. There are following changes since 1.7.6:

* a new function GetVideoSize() was added to get the size and aspect ratio of the video material currently displayed. That function should be used to determine the proper size of the OSD.
* the OSD and font sizes now are defined in percent of the actual video display size. Maximum size of OSD can be set to 1920×1080.
* OSD size is adjusted automatically according to information returned by GetVideoSize().

VDR 1.7.7 can be found here and diff between 1.7.6 and 1.7.7 here.

Last weekend was rich on releases of open source products. After new versions of Boxee and LinuxMCE 0810 Klaus Schmidinger announced VDR developer version 1.7.6. The changes since 1.7.5 are following:

* cDevice::PlayTs() now syncs on the TS packet sync bytes.
* Made MAXFRAMESIZE a multiple of TS_SIZE to avoid breaking up TS packets.
* No longer resetting the patPmtParser in cDevice::PlayTs(), because this caused the selected audio and subtitle tracks to fall back to the default.
* The SVDRP command PUTE now supports reading the EPG data from a given file (thanks to Helmut Auer).
* Added cThread::SetIOPriority() and using it in cRemoveDeletedRecordingsThread (thanks to Rolf Ahrenberg).
* Fixed the MEGABYTE() macro to make it correctly handle parameters resulting in values larger than 2GB.
* Added cDevice::NumProvidedSystems() to PLUGINS.html (was missing since it had been implemented).
* Fixed distortions when switching to the next file during replay.
* Fixed detecting the frame rate for streams with PTS distances of 1800, which apparently split one frame over two payload units.
* Added missing ‘const’ to cRecording::FramesPerSecond() (thanks to Joachim Wilke).
* Any TS packets in the first “frame” after a cut in an edited recording that don’t belong to a payload unit that started in that frame now get their TEI flag set, so that a decoder will ignore them together with any PES data collected for that PID so far (thanks to Oliver Endriss for reporting chirping sound disturbances at editing points in TS recordings).
* cDvbPlayer::Empty() subtracts 1 from readIndex, because Action() will first increment it.
* Only storing non-zero Pts values in ptsIndex.
* Added a note to the INSTALL file about using subdirectories to split a large disk into separate areas for VDR’s video data and other stuff (suggested by Udo Richter).

I’d like remind you that the main target of VDR 1.7.X is support of HDTV.