Most (but not all) TV SD channels use MPEG2 codec and require the MPEG2 license to be played with omxplayer.Rascas wrote:That doesn't confirm the video codec. VLC doesn't even use omxplayer, or any kind of hardware acceleration on the Pi.cjan wrote: no, all SD-TV channels can play under VLC sdl_vout.
Anyway, if you are using a RPi 2 or 3, mmal is the recommended (default), since it has more features, using only slightly more resources.
SDL output of VLC is software only.
If you compile VLC with HW acceleration (OpenMax only, MMAL doesn't work), you will also need the MPEG2 codec to use the HW acceleration for SD TV video.