[mythtv-users] PVR 350, mplayer, and black screen... sometimes

[Jesse D. Guardiani]

Hello,

I decided to ditch xine and go with mplayer because
xine was dying with an audio message at the beginning
of the "Hitch" DVD. mplayer plays much smoother (I've
got a tiny CPU), has a more friendly volume control,
and actually manages to play widescreen DVDs as
widescreen for some reason (xine makes everything
letterbox on my 4:3 screen).

Downside is that mplayer doesn't support DVD menus,
but I think I can live with that for now.

The only real problem I have with mplayer is that 
sometimes it shows a black screen instead of the
movie. Sound works, but no video. If I go to Watch
TV, then come back, 1 out of 5 times it will work
and I can watch the movie in mplayer. I get annoying,
but very thin "static" lines about an inch below the
picture, but it works.

When I Watch TV, while attempting to fix this
problem, I briefly see a snapshot of what was playing
in mplayer before I exited, even though I can't see
that picture WHILE mplayer is playing. So it must
have something to do with the way the screen is
being initialized.

I've put the following in my mplayer wrapper script,
but it doesn't help:

/usr/local/bin/ivtvctl -l 0
/usr/local/bin/ivtvctl -j reg=0x6c,val=0xfa -d /dev/video16
/usr/local/bin/ivtvctl -c stream_type=0
/usr/bin/amixer set PCM 87%
/usr/bin/mplayer $1 -fs -zoom -framedrop -vo xv -ao oss -mixer-channel
vol

I've tried `ivtvctl -a` before it doesn't work,
after, and when it's briefly fixed, then diffed
the results, but here are no differences.

I'm running ivtv 0.3.7c... and the XV enabled ivtv
X driver.

Any ideas?


-- 
Jesse Guardiani
Programmer/Sys Admin
jesse at wingnet.net