Pauli Borodulin

Since Debian Lenny is about to be released this weekend, I decided to upgrade my VDR box from Debian Etch to the upcoming Lenny. Instead of just doing dist-upgrade, I decided to do a complete reinstall from scratch including upgrading some of the components used by my VDR setup.

Now my current setup is:

• FFmpeg revision 17245
• DirectFB 1.0.1
• Xinelib 1.1.16.2
• VDR 1.6.0-2, with the following plugins
• xineliboutput 1.0.4
• epgsearch 0.9.24
• femon 1.6.6
• remote 0.4.0
• skinsoppalusikka 1.6.3
• streamdev 0.3.4
• sc 0.9.1

I also upgraded to the latest v4l-dvb tree for which I ported the Mantis driver by Manu Abraham.

I have recently been working to get some web services to run on Glassfish, which uses Metro. The web services need to be called from different clients (some not even written in Java) and unfortunately not all clients work as documented. Sometimes it’s because of incorrect configuration, sometimes because of interoperability problems etc.

Comparing the requests sent by different clients makes it easier to debug the reasons for the problems. Since not all clients allow dumping the created requests upon sending, it would be nice if it was possible to ask Metro to do it. Fortunately, this is possible through configuration. For doing this, Arun Gupta describes the possible properties in his blog.

The easiest way is to add parameters

-Dcom.sun.xml.ws.assembler.client=true
-Dcom.sun.xml.ws.assembler.server=true


to your Glassfish domain’s domain.xml as jvm-options elements.

I have recently upgraded my VDR setup with more recent software and plugin versions! My current setup consists of

• FFmpeg revision 15245
• DirectFB 1.0.1
• Xinelib 1.1.15
• VDR 1.6.0-2, with the following plugins
• xineliboutput 1.0.1
• epgsearch 0.9.24
• remote 0.4.0
• skinsoppalusikka 1.6.1
• streamdev 0.3.4
• sc 0.9.0

I’m using Matrox G550 and its tv-output to display the video image on my old 28″ analog television.

The actual reason for the upgrade was to get a recent FFmpeg version to play videos using xineliboutput’s media player. Everything went well except that for some reason, there’s a problem with the OSD when playing videos using software scaling (hardware scaling made OSD look awful). I posted a question about the problem on the VDR mailing list to see, if anyone else has had this problem. It seems to be some kind of initialization problem during playback, but I have not yet been able to find out the cause for it.

For those who don’t know what VDR is: It can be used to make a computer to function as a video disk recorder (article in Wikipedia).

I have just reworked Kristian Slavov’s remote control patch for Manu Abraham’s latest Mantis driver tree. The original patch was posted in April 2007 on linux-dvb mailing list. The reworked version contains only the remote controller functionality and it applies cleanly to the latest version (cd1fc4c7f1d8) of the driver tree. The patch is available at http://pauli.borodulin.fi/misc/mantis-rc-cd1fc4c7f1d8.patch.

Here’s some tips to get it working:

1. Get a snapshot of Manu’s tree from http://www.jusst.de/hg/mantis/
2. Extract the tree and apply the patch:
   tar jfx mantis-cd1fc4c7f1d8.tar.bz2
cd mantis-cd1fc4c7f1d8
patch -p1 < mantis-rc-cd1fc4c7f1d8.patch
3. Compile and install
   make
make install

The remote control will be visible through /dev/input. You can check the correct device by running dmesg. You should be able to spot a like similar to this: “input: Mantis VP-2033 IR Receiver as /class/input/input3″. To use the remote control with VDR you will need something like vdr-remote.

Edit 1 (2008-05-19): A revised version of the patch is available here. It is against the driver tree revision b14e79e460fc.

Edit 2 (2009-01-05): A revised version of the patch is available here. It is against the driver tree revision 303b1d29d735 (works for VP-2040 too!).