I've been working on my freevo setup for a few weeks now (problems with hardware, also had the bad luck of buying a Hauppauge PCI that used the CX2388XX chip and not the BT8x8 :-( ) and am now fairly close to my goal. A few issues remain to be properly sorted out though, and hopefully someone on this list has some tips for me.
First, my config:
Shuttle SN41G2 - Integrated graphics adaptor, GeForce4 MX with 32/64/128MB mem (configurable) - 512MB Crusader PC2100 memory (works best in synch mode) - Onboard nForce2 (RealTek ALC650) audio with optical SP/DIF port on the front - Athlon XP1900+ cpu
OS: - Gentoo linux 1.4 rc2 - Kernel 2.4.20 (gentoo patches, work OK with all my other patches so far) - Freevo latest release version - Mplayer ---- || ----- - Nvidia nforce driver 1.02.56
Connected items: - Pioneer surround receiver w/ AC3/DD/PCM/MPEG decoder. Optical inputs only. - Sony 32" 50Hz TV
1: The integrated graphics adaptor has a TV out that works beautifully in BIOS and Windows XP. Under X11 using NVidias own drivers, I get a decent picture (using SVHS and RGB signalling) but strangely enough the X11 driver is locked to only the 'standard' resolutions of 800x600 & 640x480, both at 60Hz - none of which are proper TV resolutions at all, and while my TV does display 60Hz signals as well as 50Hz, this is certainly not a PAL-B signal. I've tried creating proper (well, what I consider proper anyway) modelines for normal and overscan PAL modes (720x540 & 768x576 @ 50Hz) but the nvidia drivers spat them out and reverted to 800x600, blatantly stating that "this is not a valid TV mode" - uhh, come again?
Anyway, I did some digging around and noticed that the framebuffer device seems much more configurable in terms of resolution and frequencies, so I figured I'd look into this as an alternative to X11 - I won't be using the box for normal X apps anyway.
Question one then is: has anyone successfully set up a geforce2/3/4 card with TV-out using either the kernel-supplied rivafb or the directfb device drivers, and if so how satisfied were you with the result?
2: I really want to get surround sound using the digital spdif sound out (this was actually one of the determining parameters when I bought this particular SFF). Again, this works beautifully in WinXP, but I am not really satisfied with this under linux/freevo. In a nutshell, I have not been able to get surround sound at all using the optical connector; specifying 6channels in mplayer options makes the digital sound flakey (disappears entirely in some movies) and does not give me more than two channels on the amp. Adding -surround=nn did not help the matter either.
Question two: Has anyone tested the alsa drivers with an nforce2 board and spdif outputs and verified if this works? If it does then I'll grab the source and compile the modules.
3: I wound up turning off the WID parameter for mplayer, as I could never get both mpeg2 and avi files to play properly at once with a freevo-supplied window. This helped a lot, but there is still a problem with avis not playing back in the proper aspect ratio and so I was wondering if there was some way of fixing this through lirc or similar..
Question three: Does mplayer provide a way of switching the aspect ratio of a file through either keypresses or lirc after launching the file? Alternatively, does freevo support a per-movie type of optional parameters for mplayer (e.g. a config file in the movie dir that lets me specify source aspect manually)?
Cheers,
Ole Andre Schistad
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