[mythtv-users] pvr-350 recording at 720x480 question

[Larry Symms]

>I'm not trying to be an ass, I'm just trying to help you get the most
>out of the mailing list.
>
>--Ajay
>
>  
>
Thanks for the response.  Sorry in advance for the ridiculously long 
post.  I've reinstalled everything start to finish about 15 times over 
the last 9 months using jarrod's guide, the myth wikis, knoppmyth, etc.  
That being said, I'm no expert.

Here's what I've done:  I installed knoppmyth and got tv-out working in 
20 minutes.  There's a nice little perl script that does all this for 
you after knoppmyth's been installed.  I've gotten this to work on my 
own but as we all know there's 7 different ways from Sunday to do 
anything in Linux and that's double for tv-out.  Seems like every time I 
try doing it myself I screw something up and have to start all over, 
eventually getting it to work.  One thing I've noticed is that when I 
set it up myself the X display is always way bigger than the screen when 
I configure TV-out myself.  Is this adjustable by manipulating Overscan?

My goal is to be able to burn a dvd without transcoding.  After setting 
the recording profiles to 720x480 and with a higher bitrate (yes I know 
this uses more space it's worth it for me even if it were twice the 
size), I get some very odd behavior.  I begin watching live tv or a 
recorded program.  My screen will look perfect.  Great clarity and 
color.  OSD is centered and readable.  Intermittently while doing this 
the image with turn green/purple and/or stretch way beyond the left side 
of the tv screen.  Running ivtvctl -j reg=0x6c,val=0xf5 makes it better 
but the OSD is way bigger than the screen and I'm definitely loosing a 
lot of image.  The aspect ratio seems ok though (no apparent 
stretching).  The problem will continue to happen as I watch recordings 
or live tv, and I have to keep running that ivtvctl command.  I'm 
starting to worry that this intermittent shifting could be a memory 
fault in the card's registers. 

Here's some of my setup:

modules.conf snippet:

alias char-major-81 videodev
alias char-major-61 lirc_i2c
options ivtv debug=1
options tuner type=47
options msp3400 once=1 simple=1
install ivtv /sbin/modprobe tuner; /sbin/modprobe msp3400; 
/sbin/modprobe saa7115;  /sbin/modprobe --ignore-install  ivtv; 
/sbin/modprobe ivtv-fb
remove ivtv /sbin/modprobe -r --ignore-remove ivtv && /sbin/modprobe -r 
saa7115 && /sbin/modprobe -r msp3400 && /sbin/modprobe -r tuner && 
/sbin/modprobe -r ivtv-fb

XF86Config-4 snippet:

Section "Device"
        Identifier  "Hauppauge PVR 350 iTVC15 Framebuffer"
        Driver      "ivtvdev"

        ### change fb1 to whatever number you got in the previous section
        Option      "fbdev" "/dev/fb1"
        Option      "ivtv" "/dev/fb1"

        ### change the busid to whatever is reported by lspci. Note that
        ### output of lspci is hex, so add a preceding "0x" to the BusID
        BusID "0:0x8:01"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
        Identifier  "TV Screen"
        Device      "Hauppauge PVR 350 iTVC15 Framebuffer"
        Monitor     "NTSC Monitor"
        DefaultDepth 24
        DefaultFbbpp 32
        Subsection "Display"
          Depth 24
          FbBpp 32
          Modes "720x480"
        EndSubsection
EndSection

I'm not sure why the script uses ivtv and fbdev in the Xconfig.