The yaVDR-Team proudly presents the - as we believe - first OSD independent picture in picture (PiP) solution for the VDR. If you own more than one DVB card, you are now able to watch two arbitrary channels at the same time!

As we are using menuorg as default and changes to menuorg do not require a vdr restart, plus we needed to rework that section anyway, we felt that the use of menuorg to define the Commands menu would be preferable. If you used drive your own commands there, you need to change them to a menuorg custom template.

"How to do that?" - you might ask.

Right from the start "suspend to RAM" was one of yaVDRs most beloved features giving our users the possibility to start their VDR within a few seconds. While this worked great for a lot of hardware, there were still some configurations where it didn't. That's why we decided to improve the situation by choosing a different method for yaVDR 0.3: "Userspace Software Suspend".

Ever wanted to start your VDR with your remote control? With yaVDR-0.3 you can, if the receiver of your remote control has the ability to wake the computer from sleep.

In order to get HDMI sound with these cards a fairly new alsa driver package is required. We used to ship an alsa-dkms package. However, since a while ubuntu ships allready compiled drivers of this version for each kernel update. 

So how you get your sound working now for these cards in yavdr-0.3 ?

Inspired by a Howto of VDR Portal user "grmpl" has posted in yavdr subforum at http://www.vdr-portal.de/board/thread.php?threadid=99789 (Wow, what a post for someone who has just registered!), I thought it makes sense to write something on how to use inputlircd and the reason why we support it as an additional option.

Lircd is great on providing support for usual remote controls. In case of the device is an input device inputlircd is by far the better option. It takes the input events and translates them to lircd events. This makes it very easy, since no key needs to be defined explicitly, those if started with the right options (http://www.digipedia.pl/man/doc/view/inputlircd.8/) the keys will be directly available at the lircd socket.

Why do we use upstart for our jobs ?

With Karmic, Ubuntu started the transition to upstart. With Lucid most of the important jobs have been migrated. Since yavdr 0.2.0 we base our distro on Ubuntu Lucid Lynx. To benefit from this new technology we decided early to go this road. The downside is obviuosly that its not that well known and documented as System-V init scripts. So what jobs do exist in yavdr and whats ther task ?

Lets first start how we get the display ...

Lifeguard performs various tests specified by the user when vdr wants to shutdown the machine. The shutdown is postponed if any of the tests indicates that there are other processes that should not be interrupted.

We would like to give you an overview about some interesting new features in the upcoming yaVDR 0.3, starting today with describing how we included support for the Sundtek DVB USB stick driver.

Some members of our team depend on DVB-C for receiving digital TV. But the choice of DVB-C hardware is limited, especially when it comes to external devices. Then we discovered Sundtek MediaTV Pro. For an easy installation of the Sundtek stick, we have packaged the Sundtek driver in an Debian/Ubuntu package.