[mythtv-users] PVR-350 TV out on widescreen?

[Steve Davies]

Jarod C. Wilson said:
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> On Thursday 08 January 2004 11:31, Steve Davies wrote:
>> Is anybody doing this? Using a PVR-350 to drive a 16:9 television?
>>
>> How is the picture presented, and what settings are required on the TV?
Can
>> it display 16:9 widescreen and 4:3 streams correctly?
>
> The 350 outputs a 4:3 television signal via s-video. You can display it
on a
> 16:9 set in stretched mode, like any other s-video source. What 16:9
streams
> are you hoping to have it display? It can't handle HD streams, but there
are
> patches out there for mplayer, so you can play back DVDs with it, and there
> are switches you can throw at mplayer to tell it the display is 16:9,
despite
> the 4:3 resolution.
>
> (mplayer -monitoraspect 16:9 fie_to_play.mpg)
>

I have a MythTV box with a DVB-T card. This means that the MPEG2 streams
vary between aspect ratios, and can even change mid-stream. The ideal
result would be if 16:9 images were decoded into the 4:3 frame
"anamorphically", and 4:3 images had black bars placed left and right
before being treated the same as 16:9.

As you say, the TV would need to operate in a mode that stretches the
picture horizontally. From looking at the firmware documentation on the
ivtv site, the PVR-350 can encode into either a 4:3 or 16:9 aspect ratio
file, but the decoder always assumes 4:3.

If this is true, I'll just have to keep trying to get a better picture out
of my Geforce4 card.

Thanks,
Steve