Hi all, I just put together my first KnoppMyth box!

AMD Athlon 800
512 Meg Ram
PVR-350 - SVideo out (Hardware Decode)
Nvidia TNT2
Knoppmyth R5A26
IVTV 4.0 Drivers

I'm very pleased with it so far. However, Svideo out seems to be a little on the Hazy side when looking at reference items such as the text in the Myth menus. I also have a Replay TV (that I replaced with the MythTV). The ReplayTV was crystal clear in it's menus so it's not my cables.

I've done some searching and I've seen sparse hints to this issue but haven't come across any hard answers that fiy my situation exaclty. What I've seen references the badzzzz drivers but I'm not sure about what exactly I need to do to make them work. I've also read about using ivtvctl to adjust things but don't quite have my head around what settings I need to play with.

Any help would be appreciated!

Thanks

EtherNut

Here's another recent post I found on MythTVtalk.com with the same indications that I have. I'm not able to test turning off hardware MPEG because I'm out of town this week but will when I return on Saturday.

Any Ideas?

My pvr-350's hardware out is very bright and sharp. Mush better then the geforce 3 I was using before. I can't really imagine a sharper picture on my 36 inch sony wega. Depending on the channel it was recorded from my mythtv recordings can look just as crisp as a DVD. I'll try disabling the hardware decoding to see what the playback looks like. My playback through mplayer is very crisp as well. Though I can see tearing of the picture sometimes. I think without the hardware playback the tearing will happen for all myth playback.

The hardware decoding is handled by the IvyTV driver. Where the X desktop is handled by a different driver. So if you see a sharp picture in the myth frontend menus but a bad picture durring program playback the fault would be in the IvyTv driver.

Thanks for the insight. I guess I really didin't make the distinction between the Mthtyv interface and livetv/recorded tv. I think what I'm seeing is very good as far as the TV is concerned but I really notice it when I'm in the menus of Mythtv, as the text does not see very sharp. Hmmm. So do I need to look at my ivtvdev driver then?

Thanks!

Well the ivtv driver is not directly used for the X desktop (mythtv frontend menus). It does initialize the pvr-350 card at boot and load the correct firmware driver onto the card's memory. As long as the ivtv driver is loading the firmware correctly and you have the newest firmware in the correct directory, I'd say pay no attention to the ivtv driver. You could try useing different firmware revisions to see if there is any change.

Enabeling/disabeling the pvr-350 hardware decoding in the mythtv setup will have no effect on the X desktop (frontend menus). The X desktop uses a framebuffer driver for the pvr-350.

I tried playing some recordings with the pvr-350's hardware decoding disabled last night. The difference was noticable to me. But it was still a very good picture. Basacally the same as when I use mplayer to play an .avi or .mpeg file. You could try the same thing and if there is a large difference in quality it would point to a problem with your framebuffer driver for the pvr-350.