[mythtv-users] Playing DVDs on PVR-350

[Dudley Atkinson]

>
> Yeah.  I've still got some testing to do.  I'll either:
> a) just use a pretty-good card with TV out (i.e. MX440 or FX5200SE) for
> everything to get the benefits of Xv and OpenGL without sacrificing much
> video quality
> b) use the PVR-350's TV out for video and the video card's TV out for
> DVD's, games, etc. while having LIRC automatically send signals to my
> A/V receiver to switch outputs when necessary
> c) use the video card's VGA out with a good quality VGA to NTSC converter.
>
> I gave up on the PVR-350 TV out for everything.  It's a sweet picture,
> but DVD playback leaves something to be desired.
>
> Right now, I'm just trying to figure out how to get that pretty-good
> video card for cheap.  Unfortunately, I was travelling when Harry O.
> posted the message about the $20 PNY GF440MX at TigerDirect, and they've
> sold out.  Now, I just can't bring myself to pay $30 when I've seen one
> cheaper. ;)
>
> Mike


Okay, so here is what I'm doing....  It seems kludgy but it works pretty
well so far as getting all of the displays working independently of each
other (enough so that they can exist peacefully).

I started by having two lines in the Xservers file, but that wasn't
satisfactory when it came to autologin and such.  Maybe someone can tell me
how to autologin on two displays and not one with KDE.  I wanted KDE on the
main display because it lets me use some nifty tools every now and then.  I
could probably abandon it but I'm thinking it over.

So I launch KDE the normal way with kdm and one entry in the Xservers file
for the PVR-350 display.  That is the main display (watching DVD's is a
secondary task for me).

Then once that display :0 is up, I launch "su - myth2 -c "xinit".  "myth2"
is a user I made for this purpose, who has an .xinitrc and a .xserverrc file
to tell it what to launch.  The X console is launched as :1 on vt8.

Now I can move through the menus on the PVR-350 just fine, and when I want
launch mplayer on display :1, then move to that console.  It works pretty
well, but I'm going to experiment further.

Any good ideas to make this better?