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!

Be warned: If your VDR only has a single tuner, you will be restricted to channels that belong to the same transponder!

To get this nice feature, you only have to install the addon package yavdr-addon-pip. The package adds two new functions to the launcher and the VDR OSD menu. With PIP on/off you can switch the PiP on or off, like the name of the function suggests. The function PIP swap replaces the currently displayed channel of the full screen window with the channel within the PiP window. You can find the icons for this functions in the first row of the launcher, or you can use the OSD menu entries available at Applications->PIP.

If you don't like the default dimensions of the PiP window or the size of its distance to the upper right corner of the screen you can create a configuration file to enforce customized values. To understand which values to use there, please read the following explanation:

• The default value for the PiP window width is set to 720 pixels. This value was crafted for a screen being 1920 pixels wide (Full HD). If your screen has a smaller amount of horizontal pixels, the actual pixel width will be automatically resized proportionally. Example: If your screen is 1280 pixels wide and you don't touch the default value of 720 pixels, the resulting width of the PiP on that screen will be 480 pixels (720/1920*1280).
• The height of the PiP window will be automatically adapted so that the aspect ratio is maintained.
• The margins from the top and from the right screen border are 30 pixels by default.

To change size or border values of the PiP windoe, create a file /etc/default/vdr-pip with contents similar to this:

# PiP width relative to a TV screen resolution of 1920 pixles
PIPWIDTH=640 # a little bit smaller than the default of 720 pixels

# Margin from the right border
PIPRIGHTMARGIN=50 # raise margin to compensate overscan

# Margin from the top border
PIPTOPMARGIN=50    # raise margin to compensate overscan

Don't make the window too large. For technical reasons, the PiP window doesn't use VDPAU. The current window size is managed by an Intel Atom 330 without any problems, but with higher resolutions that could get problematic.

To use this functionality with your remote control you have to add two entries to the file /var/lib/vdr/keymacros.conf. For example:

User0          MENU 6 1 1
User1          MENU 6 1 2

In this blog posting, we can't cover how to configure your remote control to send the user keys. Please check other ressources (vdr-wiki, etc.) to find out how to do this.