I was looking for a fix to get rid of a black screen on my tv (using PAL). Apparently an old problem when using the tv-out on my hauppauge 350 (still haven't found a solution to the problem ) when I saw somewhere that I wouldn´t be able to play DivX when using the tv-out on the 350!
This leaves me with following question:
1) Can this be true or is there a workaround?
2)Also, are there more features that are unavailable when using pvr 350 tv-out?
3)not really a part of this topic, but can any one tell me how and where to reconfigure the right file if I need to change tv-out to the graphic card?

Knoppmyth R5C7 has pvr-350 support built in. You will have to edit the /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 file and set the correct timings for PAL.

I play Xvid (you call them DivX) videos all the time on my pvr-350. Who told you that wouldn't work?

I´m not sure exactly where I read it (I have been surfing around this forum and on the mythtv-forum as well for the last 2 weeks). The problem had something to do with avi and DivX (xvid) not beeing supported by the pvr-350 HW.
However, I´m glad that pvr-350 does infact support DivX. How about avi?

The pvr-350 hardware does not support DivX, .avi, .wmv, .asf, .swf, .rm or any other format other then mpeg-1 & 2.

The pvr-350 does however support the ivtv framebuffer driver. That allows the computer's CPU to write whatever it wants to into the pvr-350's display memory. So the pvr-350 will playback anything you are able to play with mplayer, xine, vlc, etc. Just everything will be done by the CPU and displayed with DMA memory transfers instead of the more popular "accelerated" video card method.

First of all, thx for your help

Hmm, let me get this straight: does this mean that when playing mpeg1+2 the pvr-350 does the "work" and when all other formats are played, the CPU takes over --- OR does it mean that the CPU does all the work including mpeg 1+2?

If the last case is true, then the whole point of using the pvr-350´s encoding/decoding ability kind of disappears?

Yes, Exactly.

_________________
Grant

Is that automatic? Or is there configuration that needs to be setup in association with that?

One of my main purposes that I'd like my MythTV box to serve is as a super-huge DVD Jukebox.

I haven't decided yet whether to try re-encoding my DVDs as divx/xvid, but if I decide that my time is worth more than my money I may just buy a bunch of hard disk space and fill it with ISO images of DVDs.

It'd be nice if playing a DVD ISO's mpeg2 used the PVR-350's chip so that my server's CPU will be free to do more valuable things.

Ok thx to both of you (grante & ryanpatterson). This has helped me a lot..

I guess I will try using the getpvr.pl script (saw somewhere that this would eb the way to get tv-out working)

First of all don't use getpvr.pl. Use the latest version of knoppmyth R5C7 which has pvr-350 TV-out support built in.

Secondly just because the pvr-350 has support to playback mpeg-1/2 doesn't mean it is automatically used. Any recordings made through MythTV will automatically use the pvr-350's decoding when you play them back. But any recording played back using mplayer/xine/vlc does not automatically use the pvr-350's hardware support even if the recording is mpeg-1/2 format.

I did see a patch for mplayer (might have been xine, can't recall) a while ago that allowed it to use the pvr-350 for mpeg-1/2 playback. I never tired it. As I remember it was still a work in progress.

Fortunately I haven't had the time to run the getpvr.pl



Has anybody seen such a patch or has any knowledge about it? I really need to get as much of the enc/decoding on the tuner because it eventually will be put in a very smalle case based on an epia motherboard with passiv cooling. This way I´ll be able to use a 800MhZ cpu without getting it to heat up. (at least that´s my idea)



So, here´s where I am right now:
Goals:
1. Get tv-out working on pvr-350 : almost there. I can view a tv-channel on tv-out (however still with some "snow" on it, but that should be "fixable")but the gui part (or user interface) of mythtv doen't show on the tv!
2. Get mythtv out on both my monitor and my tv (this could be done on GB-PVR which is for windows). I have hoped that I eventually could throw a 7" LCD touch screen on my graphic card instead of a monitor).

So, my first problem is to get the user interface of Mythtv out on my tv!
The other thing with both monitor & tv on the same time might need to get posted in another thread..