[mythtv-users] PVR-350 TV-Out user experience

[Tim Harvey]

Greetings,

I've just gotten my PVR-350 TV-Out working and have a few questions for
the others that are doing so.

In your opinions, what are the Pro's / Con's of using the PVR-350
TV-Out?  Here's what I have come up with via my experimentations:

Pro's: 

- Quality
It would seem that you get a better picture quality when using MythTV
(Live TV or pre-recorded non-transcoded nuv files from MythTV).  I
believe this is simply because its not having to do any scaling of the
video.

- Dual headed display
Using the PVR-350's output via ivtv-fb and XFree86, you get a 2nd
X-Windows screen (output to your TV) for MythTV to run on while your
video card still provides another X-Windows screen that you can develop
with or what not

- No need for another TV-Out solution
Most video cards today seem to have a TV-Out anyway.  Personally I
haven't gotten mine to work quite right yet (NVidia GeForce 440MX...
should work fine, I just have to hammer some more on it)

Anything else???


Con's:

- The performace of MythVideo playing back DivX and VOB's is pretty bad
on my Athlon 2600+ system via the ivtv-fb.  IMHO that makes the PVR-350
a poor choice for me as I greatly value the MythVideo plugin for my
movie collection.  I've seen others post that they believed the playback
framerate via ivtv-fb should be acceptable, but I haven't been able to
see it.  Perhaps I'm doing something wrong?  I've experimented with
cmdline args for mplayer and haven't been able to boost the performance
enough to be acceptable for the larger bitrate files (the Divx files I
have at 760kbps video or lower are just about acceptable, but the VOB's
are definitely horrible)

- The TV-Out is overscanned (which is appropriate) causing you to have
to tweak your gui size and offsets, and your OSD overscan within MythTV.
This itself is not a problem however to get my GUI fitting appropriately
I've had to use a GUI size of 648/432 (offset of 35x30) which isn't
large enough to show many of the setup screens entirely (a bunch of them
have no buttons visible as they can't fit vertically).


I'm using MythTV v0.13 and ivtv-0.1.9.  Perhaps I'm missing something by
not having the latest CVS of MythTV?  I know David Engel has been
submitting some patches but I haven't tried them out yet and am not
really sure what effect they could have as this seems to be a general
ivtv-fb performance issue and nothing to do with MythTV.

Thanks for sharing any feedback,

Tim