[mythtv-users] How do you compile with support for TV Out on PVR 350?

[Torsten Schenkel]

On Sat, 2003-11-01 at 15:21, James Pifer wrote:
> Thanks Ward. If that's true that sucks. Some people have said that the
> TV Out on the 350 provides much better quality...maybe they were talking
> theory. If what you say is correct, that may mean back to Winblows until
> support gets better. 

AFAIK, Windows doesn't support the TV-out of the PVR350 at all. All it
does is stream mpeg2 streams to it, so TV will be on the PVR's TV-out
and the menus will be on VGA. I definitely wouldn't like to have a PC
monitor next to my TV set :-)

> I want to hook this thing up to my home theater without
> keyboard/mouse/monitor. Leave the front end up all the time and control
> playing LiveTV and recordings through the remote, and recording through
> remote and mythweb. Maybe what I'm thinking won't work. Will I be able
> to see MythTV's menus when I'm using TV Out?

You'll be able to do so, the driver is "alpha" though and under heavy
development currently. It's amazing how much the driver improved over
the last week, with 1-3 "releases" every day. Open Source development at
it's best. Kudos to Kevin and Jens :-)

Right now it works quite well on my setup (Epia ME6000, VIA Eden
600MHz), I mapped some killall and restart skripts to the On/Off button
of my remote to restart everything when a hang occurs -- once or twice a
day ATM -- but it's usable if you are willing to put some effort in it.
If not, give it time till christmas.

> Right now I have it hooked up to my Infocus X1 using the VGA cable.
> Video quality is probably acceptable, accept I really want the 350 doing
> the decoding/encoding work. Bad part the sound quality, headphone jack
> to composite RCA, really sucks. Plus, I can't forward the video to the
> rest of my TV's this way. (using Leapfrog)

I don't think I quite understood what you wanted to say in the last
paragraph. If you want to use a projector, why TV-out? For Projektor I'd
use VGA and SPDIF. As to the sound of the audio out on: I have a high
quality cable to my Dolby Digital amplifier and don't have any negative
to say about it. Full ProLogic and higher bass levels than from the
audio out of my TV. Not DD, but SPDIF also is only stereo here (for
analogue TV).  

> On Sat, 2003-11-01 at 06:41, Ward Vandewege wrote:
> > James Pifer wrote:
> > > I've read you need to compile MythTV for support for the PVR 350's TV
> > > Out. What do you need to change in the src to enable support for TV Out
> > > on a PVR 350? Is there a document somewhere that explains this?

Don't know if you have to recompile it. I compile it anyways, so never
looked at the binary distributions. But I don't think so, there is no
option to the compilation that en- or disables TV-out of the PVR. You
enable it in the TV setup menus.

> > Err - if there is I haven't found it. I didn't recompile my Myth to use 
> > the PVR 350's TV output, but I'm currently stuck with far less than 
> > desirable results.

see above :-)

> > You need the ivtv-fb kernel module (and framebuffer support in your 
> > kernel, as well as support for '32bpp packed pixels' under 'advanced low 
> > level drivers' under 'support for framebuffer devices'. The module seems 
> > a bit buggy. It's impossible to unload, for one (has a use count of 63 
> > as soon as it is loaded). Also, there are issues with screen size - 
> > somehow my tv's screen size is slightly smaller than what X thinks it is 
> > (the video mode of the ivtv-fb is fixed, apparently, once you choose 
> > PAL/NTSC). At least I can't convince X to use a different mode.

This is exactly what's it meant to do, that's the secret behind it's
superior TV picture quality. If you would be able to tamper with the
scanning timings the lines would match with your TV and the picture
would blur (that's what happens with TV-out on a VGA card).

> > This makes it very difficult to configure Myth - the menus are partly 
> > off-screen. I've tried setting manual sizes for Myth which works, 
> > provided I also introduce an X and Y offset.

See Isaacs mail, set GUI size to something smaller than your resolution
and center it using the offset. For the OSD you'll have to increase the
overscan value in the TV setup menus (for the PVR's TV-out this setting
works the other way round, so a positive value will reduce the OSD size)

> > Also, once I have gone to 'Watch TV', the bottom 20% of the screen 
> > becomes a duplicate of the top 20%, making Myth even less useable...

Hmm, that's one of the bugs that's still there, I couldn't lay hands on
why this happens (it's once I activated the OSD in LiveTV mode, so maybe
it's mythtv that causes it, but it's some bug in ivtv-fb I guess)  

But the workaround is quite simple: Reduce the size of the GUI to
something smaller than 480 vertically, you'll still see the to 96 lines
pasted to the bottom, but with the visor theme I only get top and bottom
"headings". This way you can see the whole GUI. Your X setup must not be
changed! 

> > Anyone have more success with the PVR-350 TV-out?

Yes, me :-)

Torsten