Output devices

There are two ways:

Hardware MPEG decoder

The principle of the VDR software is avoiding to deal with MPEG data on software side as much as possible. For viewing of the video stream provided by the DVB card, a hardware video decoder is needed. There are few possibilities for decoding video on hardware:

Full-featured DVB card

Full featured DVB card has the tuner and also hardware video decoder with TV-Out

Dxr3 or Hollywood-Plus MPEG decoder card

MPEG decoder card, originally used for DVD viewing on slow computers. The current status (April 2013) is that it cannot be used on stable VDR-2.0.0 because VDR requires DVB driver api 5.3 and the API is available in recent kernel versions which are not supported by the dxr3 driver driver anymore. The dxr3 driver has the em8300 decoder chip. VDR-1.6.0 can still work with dxr3 card and Linux kernels up to 2.6.37.

Hauppauge WinTV PVR350

analogue TV card with onboard hardware MPEG2 decoder

As one sees, many of these cards are not purely output but rather input and output cards.

Software MPEG decoder

Most input cards sold nowadays are so-called budget cards, i.e. they don't have hardware video decoders. The decoding is done by the CPU and the output is usually given to the normal graphic card. There are a number of VDR software decoder plugins available:

• Softdevice-plugin Provides excellent output on VGA hardware using X11 or DirectFB. Can also do hardware MPEG2 acceleration on motherboards provided with CLE266 chipset. Can also do field perfect interlaced output using Matrox G450/550 cards under DirectFB.
• Xine-plugin (requires xine, gxine or some other xine-lib front-end). Xine can also use the hardware MPEG2 acceleration feature of the EPIA M motherboards with CLE266 chipset. Software playback on EPIA.
• Xineliboutput-plugin