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

[Jesse D. Guardiani]

On Sat, 2005-08-13 at 03:43 -0400, Jesse D. Guardiani wrote:
> On Sat, 2005-08-13 at 02:28 -0400, Jesse D. Guardiani wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> More on this:
> 
> If I execute this via SSH while the black screen is
> visible:
>     ivtvfbctl -alpha 100
> Then it goes away. I got this hint from the very
> bottom of this page:
> 
> http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=3609&sid=09c55348cf071bf496dadd92c706cd42
> 
> But the recommendation to reinstall the ivtvdev_drv.o
> didn't work for me.

OK. I worked around this problem with a wrapper script
for mplayer. I call this script instead of mplayer, and
it works pretty well. The `dd` command is necessary when
the PVR350  hasn't been initialized yet. It works well,
but it usually sends some sound output to my speakers.
That's annoying, but I don't know how to do it otherwise.
Send too little data and it doesn't initialize properly,
send too much and you hear the channel for a while on
speakers. Oh well:

/usr/bin/amixer set PCM 87%
/usr/local/bin/ivtvctl -l 0
/usr/local/bin/ivtvctl -c
stream_type=0,bitrate=4500000,bitrate_peak=6000000 -f
width=480,height=480
/usr/local/bin/ivtvctl -j reg=0x6c,val=0xfa -d /dev/video16
dd if=/dev/video0 of=/dev/video16 count=4000
/usr/local/bin/ivtvfbctl /dev/fb0 -globalalpha
/usr/local/bin/ivtvfbctl /dev/fb0 -alpha 0
/usr/bin/mplayer $1 -fs -zoom -framedrop -vo xv -ao oss -mixer-channel
vol -stop-xscreensaver -ontop
/usr/local/bin/ivtvfbctl /dev/fb0 -noglobalalpha


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