Smart Home Blog

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.

Linux distribution yaVDR – yet another VDR, offers XBMC version integrated with VDR – Video Disk Recorder. Because, as you may know, XBMC lacks PVR functionality. Moreover, yaVDR supports hardware acceleration VDPAU from the box. It allows to playback HD video even on Atom processors using power of nVidia GPU.

The latest version of yaVDR, announced yesterday, is based on Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid. It looks very promised because contains two the best in my opinion open source software XBMC and VDR in one distribution. I read before about integration VDR and XBMC but it needed too many manual work to setup such solution. With yaVDR that procedure became much easier. Even for ordinary users.

This brief howto explains clearly how to install XBMC on Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic with supporting of hardware acceleration VDPAU and integrate it with Video Disk Recorder (VDR) – popular software to build receiver for digital TV. All installations are done using packages which is much simpler that build everything from the sources. The integration between XBMC and VDR is done via VDR streamdev-server (there is an another approach based on scripts to switch between XBMC and VDR).

Except installation instructions that howto contains very useful diagram of XBMC LIRC remote action mapping (see it below). As you may see setup of LIRC remote control under XBMC is not so easy task as for the rest HTPC software. Many thanks to author for clarification of that important aspect!

If you have some troubles with VDR installation here is another howto which might help you to setup VDR with VDPAU support under Ubuntu Karmic.

Read more »

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.

Good news for all how already use unstable version of VDR 1.7.X or just are going to install it and don’t want to compile it from the sources. Gerald Dachs started the Ubuntu Jaunty/Karmic repository contained packages from VDR 1.7.X and its plugins. Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty users should just add following lines to their /etc/apt/sources.list:
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/gda-dachsweb/vdr/ubuntu jaunty main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/gda-dachsweb/vdr/ubuntu jaunty main
and upcoming 9.10 Karmic:
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/gda-dachsweb/vdr/ubuntu karmic main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/gda-dachsweb/vdr/ubuntu karmic main
After that VDR and its headers and plugins can be easily installed using apt-get.