[mythtv] Marvel G200-TV: Some success

James D. Bearden mythtv-dev@snowman.net
Tue Jan 14 05:55:23 EST 2003


Hello Folks, 

I finally had some time to work on my future PVR box. To recap, it is a 
generic Mandrake 9.0 system with hardware highlights of a Pentium III 866, a 
Matrox Marvel G200-TV, and a CMI8738 audio chipset. I had limited succes 
with the current stable version of MythTV (0.7) but I have had limited 
success with the development version currently in CVS. 

Throughout all my tweaking, it seemed that uncompressed 32000 audio seemed 
to work best for me. 

XawTV, MJPEG Tools, and Xine work flawlessly, so I had high hopes for MythTV 
and the hardware MJPEG drivers. The MJPEGTools records video at impressive 
quality with almost no CPU load. Unfortunately the MJPEG hardware support in 
MythTV isn't near enough ready for prime time apparently. The only way I 
could get it to work at all was to set the resolution to 160x160, decimation 
of 2, and a quality of 10%. Setting the decimation to 1 caused jerky, green 
video. With MJPEG Tools I could record with a quality of 100%, so needless 
to say the results were discouraging. I would suggest allowing a decimation 
of 4 to the setup as it might be helpful to play with. Even after I got the 
video working it was obviously blocky, but it was also jerky and it jumped 
horozontally. 

Next I tried RTJPEG, and I never got that working well. 

Then I tried MPEG-4, and I was surprised that I eventually tweaked it into 
usable shape! The option that seems to matter is the resolution, which I set 
to 208x160. Anything more than that would peg my CPU usage and have 
undesirable results. The other quality settings didn't seem to have much 
effect on the CPU usage or improve the quality. 

So now I can potentially use MythTV, but not by taking advantage of the 
hardware support. BTW, if you haven't upgraded to Mandrake 9.0 yet, I highly 
reccomend it. And finally, I have installed everything with RPM's except 
for: 

marvel drivers for hardware MJPEG support
XMLTV
MythTV 

 ---
James D. Bearden
james@nontrivial.org
http://james.nontrivial.org/ 

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