[mythtv-users] PVR350 + MythTv behaviour

[Torsten Schenkel]

On Mon, 2003-11-10 at 18:44, Olivier wrote:

Hi Olivier,

> I have been following ivtv and mythtv discussion latelly,

hmm, are you sure you followed it closely :-)

>  and my
> understanding is that pvr350 tv-out will only spit out a mpeg stream to the
> tv-out. This means that if we want to see tv with an overlayed OSD, mythtv
> has to modify the tv mpeg stream on the fly and encode osd information into
> it, and this is not implemented yet. I also read that mythtv currently
> support PVR350 tv out by switching between tv mode (mpeg out) and osd
> (framebuffer). My understanding from this statement is that mythtv would
> switch between these two mode and thus, we are getting either tv or an osd
> with a black background.

The TV-Out has two main functions at the moment:

1. decoding, scaling and displaying mpeg stream
2. framebuffer, this is used for X (mythtv gui) and osd.

The two modes are displayed simultaneously. They are independend of each
other. The framebuffer content is lying "on top" of the video picture.
When viewing tv, the frambuffer content is made "transparent". When
exiting out of tv/video mode, the framebuffer is made opaque again.

The transparency setting can be set to differnt levels between opaque
and fully transparent. This can be controlled by setting an alpha value
via ivtvfbctl. The OSD (some themes at least) make use of this, so a
very stylish translucent osd is possible.

Or short: Your conception is wrong; the pvr tv-out is capable of all
that's necessary to drive an otherwise headless system.

What's missing in the driver (but being worked at) is yuv output to
enable streaming of decoded video (divx etc.).

The driver is under heavy development and stability changes every day.
If you want to use mythtv 0.12 and not the current cvs version, the last
driver known to work (known to me that is) is the 311003 edition by Jens
Axboe.

Torsten 
-- 
Config files for PVR350 TV-Out:
http://www-isl.mach.uni-karlsruhe.de/~hi93/ivtv-pvr-350-conf.tgz