Hello all,

First off I have to say that I'm a complete n00b here, and I haven't bought any parts yet, but I have a question about what Myth can and can't do.

While researching what cases I'd like to buy I came across this case and nearly wet myself. How cool is that? But here's the question. How (if at all) does Myth handle dual displays? Ideally I would like the in-case LCD to display status info, or maybe the weather or even XDaliclock. What would be even cooler would be to use it to control the giude in a touch screen mode or something like that, while still displaying the video on my TV.

The Video card that I would be using would be this one, since it has VGA as well as S-VIDEO or Component output. While I have been able to get TV-out working on my current Nvidia card, would I have to run two concuerrent Xsessions and there for two Myth front ends to get something like this to work, or am what I'm asking currently impossible without some major re-coding?

If it makes any difference at all I would be capturing video from a comcast digital cable box with a Hauppgage 250, digital audio using the onboard S/PDIF Coxial in and out, and video out with the above mentioned video card.

Thanks for your help

well many cards can do clone displays, the problem is not many at all (no nvidia cards can) actually display video ( xv ) on both screens so then your problem becomes trying to get your tv to be the primary screen with xv instead of the 7" taking it. and I don't think myth is setup to take touch screen input so that would be a bit of work.

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Xsecrets

Hmmm....

Okay. Well would it be possible to run a near empty gnome session with only gdesklets running on the LCD while everything else runs on the TV? I guess what I'm asking is can Myth front end run on top of gnome and have the display extended over two screens instead of clone. Or, will I have to have two Xsessions running and set up the VGA and the TV out as two displays in my X config?

Thanks again

with some tweaking you could probably make either work, the only big issue is that the only video card I've actually heard of someone getting video displaying on both screens simultaneously (from a recent thread) is the matrox g400 or it might have been a 450 can't remember right now.

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Xsecrets

Dual display is hard. Having two monitors attached to the same VGA cable is easier.

You can get double adaptors, or distribution amplifiers, to drive two screens. They occasionally cause problems with DDC (display resolution and sync detection), but that can be worked around (by removing those pins from the secondary monitor, which in this case would be the in-case LCD).

Touchscreen isn't possible in MythTV yet. Sorry.

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| Nigel Pearson, nigel.pearson.au@gmail.com
| "Things you own end up owning you" - Tyler, Fight Club

Eh??? Actually I found out that enabling TV out to be easy once you finally figure out how to make that work. If you set up the TV as a second screen in Xorg.conf you get a WIDE desktop. This causes problems because when a window is maximised, it gets split across two screens. If you set up the two ports as two different displays then it's not a problem.

Well I guess the answer would be to set things up as two displays. Have the TV as the main and the LCD as the second.

However this still begs the question: How well does Myth work with Gnome (or KDE)? Since both displays would be running gnome, but only one uses Myth (the TV) and the other running Gdesklets (on the LCD). Is this possible or does the Myth front-end need to be runing by itself? 'Cause if this two display thing can't work out, them I'm definatly going to get a cheaper case.

BTW Does anybody know suitable this card would be? I would like to keep everything in either S-Video or Component as I no longer have to suffer the tyrany of coposite

Thanks again

A combined card can be easy to setup, but that depends on the card - how well it is supported by Linux, whether it can drive the two ports you need at the same time, whether it supports the (usually different) resolutions that you want, et c.

Say you have a PCI and an AGP video card.
Or a motherboard VGA out that you want to use as well as an AGP card.
Or you want to drive a HD widescreen display as well as an interlaced 4:3 TV.
All hard.

_________________
| Nigel Pearson, nigel.pearson.au@gmail.com
| "Things you own end up owning you" - Tyler, Fight Club

Maybe I don't understand what you are saying... I have a KnoppMyth frontend only system in the basement hooked up to the old TV via an old VCR. I configured it to "twinview clone" the display for the monitor and the TV-out from the PCI Nvidia card and it works fine. I display video on both all the time. I just watched the news and BSG Home Part 1 last Friday night.

Both the monitor and the TV display video. I used the "twinview clone" method somebody posted here on the forum. It is just a "cut 'n paste" into the XF86Config-4 file.

Maybe I don't understand the whole problem here...

Thanks!

Andrew Lynch

PS, I used a blatant rip off of the XF86Config-4 section on twinview posted here. No original thought or inovative solutions here!

http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=1150


under Section "Device"

# TV Out Setup
Option "TwinView" "1"
Option "TwinViewOrientation" "Clone"
Option "ConnectedMonitor" "CRT, TV"
Option "SecondMonitorHorizSync" "30-50"
Option "SecondMonitorVertRefresh" "60"
Option "MetaModes" "800x600, 800x600; 800x600, 640x480; 640x480, 640x480;640x480, NULL;NULL, 640x480"
#Option "MetaModes" "1024x768, 1024x768; 800x600, 800x600; 640x480, 640x480;"
Option "TVStandard" "NTSC-M"
Option "TVOutFormat" "SVIDEO"
Option "TVOverScan" "0.7"

Option "NoLogo" "1"

well if when you go to play a video or a tv show the actual video shows up on both displays concider yourself extremely lucky, as it's a fluke. xv which is used to display the video by default, (unless you change it to x11 and loose all the speed benefits of xv and have choppy video on all but the fastest hardware ) will only work on one head of a dual head display with the nvidia drivers, says so right in their readme file.

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Xsecrets

I am running a generic PCI GeForce4 MX440 SE card with 64M RAM and VGA, TV-out, VGA, and DVI connectors. I am using install-nvidia-7174-debian.sh drivers and KnoppMyth R5A16 in a frontend only mode.

Hardware is a noisy emachines 2692, 2.6 GHz Celeron, 512M RAM, 40 GB IDE HD, with no tuner (front end only)

Maybe its a fluke but it works for me!

Thanks!

Andrew Lynch

nVidia do support Two displays from the one card, here is there article on it:
http://nvidia.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/nvidia.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=176&p_created=1101836843&p_sid=6f3GbfOh&p_lva=&p_sp=cF9zcmNoPTEmcF9zb3J0X2J5PSZwX2dyaWRzb3J0PSZwX3Jvd19jbnQ9NTcmcF9wcm9kcz0wJnBfY2F0cz0wJnBfcHY9JnBfY3Y9JnBfc2VhcmNoX3R5cGU9YW5zd2Vycy5zZWFyY2hfZm5sJnBfcGFnZT0xJnBfc2VhcmNoX3RleHQ9bGludXg*&p_li=&p_topview=1

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Girkers

from the linked article

Hardware that can only be used on one display at a time (eg:
video overlays, hardware accelerated RGB overlays), and which
consequently cannot be used at all when in TwinView, can be
exposed on the first X screen when each display is a separate
X screen.

it is xv video overlays that allows video playback in the default knoppmyth config. and it says right there that it can only be used on one display at a time.

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Xsecrets

Is it possible that my KnoppMyth frontend is only using the Nvidia 7174 driver but not Xv? I did not change any default settings and I am almost certain I am not using XvMC as I never have used it or enabled it other than on my frontend/backend HDTV PVR (separate machine).

I am kind of curious as to why my POS frontend would display video on two displays when others cannot seem to do it. It suggests that I have some different configuration or maybe its a characteristic of the PCI Nvidia card.

Thanks!

Andrew Lynch

well not really sure why yours works, you are most likely using xv if you didn't change anything xv is different than xvmc. It may have something to do with the fact that you are using real video outputs for both of yours where most people are using svideo for at least one, but according to the stuff I've read it really shouldn't work either way, but I've never tried it myself as I've had no need for it.

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Have a question search the forum and have a look at the KnoppMythWiki.

Xsecrets

Xsecrets


From my understanding of the two displays TV and 7"LCD, would you not set the TV display to take the video overlay and the LCD everything else (such as the frontend) or am I missing the true meaning of what an xv video overlay is?

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Girkers