I started playing with MythTv in January when I decided it would be a fun project with which to learn Linux. Knowing I'd be less likely to give up on it if I had some money involved, I went out an bought the following equipment:
Asus Pundit-R Celeron 2.4GHz 512Mb DDR RAM 200GB Maxtor SATA PVR 350 Having precisely zero Linux experience I went with FC3 and Jarod's excellent guide as it seemed like the easiest solution. My aim was (and still is) to create a combined frontend/backend that hooks up to a standard PAL TV and can a) be used as a PVR and b) play films stored as MPEG4. Thanks both to Jarod's guide and the help from this mailing list I had a usable system up with a couple of weeks and have been playing ever since. While I've been incredibley impressed by the features and usability of MythTV, there's been one thing that I've never been able to get quite right; namely TV OUT. This has come as quite a surprise to me, seeing as I have two options in this area with both the PVR 350 and the onboard graphics of the Pundit-R. Here is what I've found so far: PVR 350. The quality of live tv on the PVR 350 is fantastic: I can't distingish it from 'regular tv', although admittedly neither my signal nor my television is particularly amazing. The problem, however, is the PVR 350's ability (or lack of it) to play MPEG 4. I initially tried the framebuffer driver (mplayer -vo x11) but found this to be too slow and so investigated using the ivtv driver with the command: mplayer -vo ivtv fileName which causes the video to be played, but not to be visible as it is being displayed behind the X window currently in the PVR 350's framebuffer. Following the advice of somebody on this list I then used the command: ivtvfbctrl /dev/fb1 -alpha 0; mplayer -vo ivtv fileName ; ivtvfbctrl /dev/fb1 -alpha 255; which makes the video video visible (and play perfectly smoothly I might add). Unfortunately the sound is now well out of sync (I'd estimate around 5 seconds), and no amount of -framedrops or --delays will help the situation. I've been at this stage for around a month now and have not found any solution, except for a post by Chris Kennedy on IVTV-devel which suggests that playing with ivtvfbctrl can cause the 350's a/v sync to mess up. My hope therefore is that if I'm somehow able to configure my ststem so that I no longer need to change the alpha then the sync issue may sort itself. Until then, the PVR 350 doesn't seem to be able to do what I want it to do. Pundit-R Tv Out. To get the Pundit-R's TV out to work most people use the 3.12 ATI driver and then a hex edit trick in order to enable TV out. Unfortuatlely the 3.12 driver only works with XFree86 and therefore not with Fedora which uses XOrg. Taking advice from soemone else on the list I tried the hex edited file with the newer 8.8.25 driver which does work with XOrg. Amazingly it worked fine. The live Tv quality on the Pundit-R is more than acceptable, providing bob deinterlacing is used. Unfortunately using bob deinterlacing casues the picture to get jittery and flickery with time, to the point that after about 5 minutes it is unwatchable. Quickly pausing and unpausing the picture resolves the problem but only for 5 minutes at which point the flickeryness returns. I've been advised by somebody on the mailing list to use Open GL as this should provice VSync support which will resolve the problem. At the time I thought I might not have open gl support, however the open gl picture transitions in myth gallery worked fine so maybe I do. Anyway there are still some avenues to explore but before I go any further I thought I'd post this to the mailing list in the hope that someone has my hardware (either the pundit-r or the 350) and has it working as I envisaged it. _______________________________________________ mythtv-users mailing list [email protected] http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
