[mythtv-users] Alternative to zbox for a frontend

[Paul Gardiner]

On 12/09/2017 15:59, Peter Bennett wrote:
> On 09/12/2017 06:10 AM, Paul Gardiner wrote:
>> I'm amazed how well this works - tiny little, silent, cool running 
>> device giving really high quality results! :-)
>>
>> There is potentially a showstopper for me. As I feared there looks to 
>> be no way to swap screen mode to match the video fps, or at least 
>> nothing that works via mythfrontend's usual mechanism. I'm in the UK 
>> so most of my content is 1080i25, but I also have recordings in 24p. I 
>> imagine I could fiddle with the X config and get it to drive my TV at 
>> 1080p50, but then the 24p stuff will be glitchy. Is there a workaround 
>> - like adding some extra menu options to mythfrontend and wire them 
>> through to some way of changing screen mode?
> I don't think that will be possible with the Raspberry Pi. I believe the 
> support for xrandr is minimal.
> 
> I have never used separate modes for videos on any frontend, even with 
> full size frontend machines. It just runs at whatever mode is being 
> supported and everything looks fine to me. Perhaps you can explain why 
> mode switching is important. What does that do for the picture? What 
> sort of "glitchy" do you experience?
> 
> My content is sometimes at 24 fps and sometimes at 30 fps and I think 
> the TV runs at 30 or 60, but I have not checked.

Yeah, it's not so important in the US: if you drive your TV at 60fps
then 30p content will be perfect and 24p will be not quite right but
perfectly acceptible. But 25p content will show a sort of hardness
to the motion (difficult to describe but very noticable), particularly
when there's a long slow pan of the camera. And if you have loads
of 25p content and you drive the tv at 50p then 24p content will show
a slight tick once per second.

24p content running with a 60p refresh rate is so close to right that
I think you'd struggle to see any problem. I'd recommend you don't
look for it, because once you see it you can never unsee it. :-)

Cheers,
	Paul.