[mythtv-users] Like an old movie!

[Bruce Markey]

JC wrote:
...
> "Howcome the picture's so faded and blury and it looks like.. like an old
> movie?"
> 
> Aargh!  Can't she appreciate the cool menus, and time-shifting, and the
> weather, and the picture gallery?  Nope... just complains about the picture
> quality and says, "can't you fix it?" and screws up her face.  <sigh>

Sorry I didn't get this to you in time for Valentine's Day
but here is suggestion... ;-) In your XF86Config-4 file, try
adding "Gamma 1.45" to the "Monitor" section:

Section "Monitor"
         Identifier      "Generic Monitor"
         HorizSync       30-50
         VertRefresh     60
         Gamma           1.45
#       Option          "DPMS"
EndSection


First, did the picture look like video on a computer monitor?
Earlier in the day that you sent this, I had been playing with
My TV settings to try to brighten the dingy look. If I correctly
set the 'brightness" to where blacker-than-black matched black
and "contrast" to a point where white does not bloom (get the
"Video Essientials" DVD if you don't have it yet) the medium
colors looked drab like old film. It struck me that it needed
more gamma correction for the TV than for the monitor.

Lots of info about gamma correction can be found at: 
http://www.cgsd.com/papers/gamma.html

There are a couple ways to change gamma in X. There is "xgamma"
to change on the fly. However, the man page suggests that
this may not work for all drivers. Also, for the ATI GATOS and
GeForce4 NVIDIA drivers I have access to, "xgamma" affected
the desktop but NOT the Xvideo output. Adding "Gamma" in the
"Monitor" section affected both.

After adding gamma of about 1.5, the picture looked less
like film and more life-like as you would expect from live TV
video. The result looked much more like T... a commercial DVR
attached to the same TV.

The X desktop then looked a little washed out so I did
"xgamma -gamma 1.0". This brough the desktop back to normal
but left the XV image bright.

 > So, I spent a couple hours playing with everything I could
 > think of, including of course, the JKL/jkl keys to tweak the
 > brightness and contrast, etc. but that doesn't do much
 > (although it helps a bit).

As a general rule, I like to adjust the TV rather than counter-
distorting. Gamma is an execption because I don't have gamma
controls on my TVs. I (fortunatly) have seperate controls on
each input for both the TVs I use. However, if all inputs are
affected by one set of controls, it would be better to use
the bttv adjustments.

--  bjm