[mythtv-users] Mythvideo, PVR-350 and problems playing video smoothly [suggestions please]

Nick Morrott pvr at insidethex.co.uk
Sun Jan 16 04:47:22 EST 2005


Hi,

I'm trying to get either mplayer or xine (latest tarballs) to play xvid and
divx videos (640x352 res typically) to play normally on the PVR-350's TV-out
under X. I am using the 0.3.2b ivtv driver and the 0.8 ivtvdev_drv X driver
to run things. Mythtv-suite 0.16 is from atrpms.net.

Having managed to install ratpoison to try and get around the PVR-350s
overscan problems (I can finally see the bits that were missing, although
the GUI offsets still don't seem to work as I'd hoped) and getting
nvram-wakeup working on the Pundit-R, I thought I'd try and get mythvideo
playing nicely too.

For mplayer I used the following command:

/usr/bin/mplayer -fs -zoom -quiet -monitoraspect 16:9 -vo x11 -ao alsa %s

and for Xine I used:

xine -pfhq -V XShm -A alsa --no-logo --no-splash %s

I understand there is no xv support for the 350, hence the use of X11
output. In both cases the video is choppy and not at all smooth. There is
also tearing during any sort of panning. With mplayer, there is also a/v
sync loss as soon as the video starts. I haven't tried DVD playback at all
at this stage. Is this something that currently is unavoidable?

Do any PVR-350 users have any suggestions to help improve this problem? My
system is using a Celeron-D 2.4Ghz and 512MB of RAM in a Pundit-R system so
should have enough grunt, and because DVB and captured MPEG2 playback is so
good I'd hoped regular video playback wouldn't be too bad. Are there any
glaring omissions from the player startup commands above that would improve
things?

I'm really hoping now that ATI finally live up to their promises and release
their new driver Monday (17th) because I guess this would solve many
problems on my Pundit-R (whether the LiveTV/playback on a TV is as good as
the PVR-350 is another matter) - the TV-Out signal is high quality on the
Pundit-R (both RGB and SVid) in my short experience but drivers are poor to
say the least and as yet don't support Xorg >6.7.0. Seems Monday is D-Day
for ATI amongst Linux users ...

Thanks in advance,

Nick



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