[mythtv-users] Shuttle SK41G TV out/Xv problems

[James Knight]

Well I finally got everything to work with the SK41G's ProSavageDDR 
K4M266 video card now..if anyone else reading the archive in the future 
is having trouble getting the hardware setup, drop me an email. :)

I'm pretty happy with the box at this point, it's quiet and pretty 
small and works. Now I have only a minor issue left, which is that the 
tv output isn't doing overscan. Modelines don't do anything AFAICT, 
probably because the driver is using BIOS mode changing calls. I've 
asked the X driver author about this, hopefully he'll have some ideas.

For anyone planning on building a mythbox, here's what I have:

Hardware:
Shuttle SK41G
Athlon 1800+
WinTV dbx model 401
Maxtor 120GB 5400RPM FDB drive (4R120L0)

Software:
Debian unstable
ALSA 0.9.0rc7
kernel 2.4.20-k7
XFree86 4.3 (from deb 
ftp://ftp.cs.umn.edu/pub/debian-misc/daniels/current/sid/i386 ./)
MythTV CVS head

I'm running the CPU at full speed, and even when encoding Live TV at 
640x480 the fan doesn't seem to speed up past the slowest, quiet speed.

On Tuesday, April 1, 2003, at 11:47  AM, James Knight wrote:
> Here's the big problem:
> I can't get XVideo and the TVout to work. XVideo works on a VGA 
> monitor. TVout works with X. But, when using TVOut, all XVideo 
> displays simply show a black screen. It doesn't crash - it appears to 
> be working quite normally, but simply doesn't display anything. This 
> is evidenced by both "mplayer -vo xv file" and trying to watch a 
> prerecorded video in mythfrontend. BUT mythfronted does play the 
> mini-preview of the previously recorded recordings..does that not use 
> Xv?

So, to answer my own questions: 1) the mini-preview does NOT use Xv.

2) Apparently the output can be "half-set" to TVout. I found that I 
needed to make sure that X was using the BIOS to switch modes (this is 
default), and I had to have run s3switch TV once (but now it appears to 
work without that). Using s3switch was a bit of a problem since the 
distributed source doesn't work right.

To make s3switch work I had to apply this patch that I got from the 
author, as the video BIOS is apparently writing to an unexpected IO 
port:

--- s3switch.c~ 2002-09-11 18:25:33.000000000 -0400
+++ s3switch.c  2003-04-01 21:22:35.000000000 -0500
@@ -101,6 +101,7 @@ IOAccess( int enable )
      ioperm( 0x61, 1, enable );
      ioperm( 0x80, 1, enable );
      ioperm( 0x3b0, 0x30, enable );
+    ioperm( 0xeb, 1, enable );
  }

James