[mythtv-users] PVR-350 won't record without reboot

[f-myth-users at media.mit.edu]

    > Date: Sat, 21 Nov 2009 20:59:20 -0500
    > From: "Michael T. Dean" <mtdean at thirdcontact.com>

    > And note that MythTV trunk can still use the PVR-350 TV out with the 
    > ivtvfb module and Xv video output.  So, all you lose on the PVR-350 is 

...although I think this was broken in a recent X and fixed last week;
there was traffic on the ivtv list recently that I can look up and
point to if anyone needs to know.  But it may be an issue with the
latency with which it works its way through various distros release
pipelines, etc.

    > the anachronistic 480i60 (576i50 for PAL) MPEG-2 decoder--where even toy 
    > CPU's can decode standard definition MPEG-2 at 50/60 fields per second 
    > without breaking a sweat.  It's not 1999, anymore.  :)

You also lose the ability to let the TV decode the closed captions
itself from things you recorded on PVR-x50 tuners, and must instead
rely on Myth being able to extract the captions from the source and
then superimpose them back on the screen using its internal player.  I
get the feeling that handling captions is a perennial afterthought for
most people, and I've seen various complaints about them being broken
in various ways at various times in Myth, but I'm not sure about their
current status---because when I want closed captions, I tell my TV to
display them from what the 350 is feeding it...  [It also means you
must find somewhere on your remote to bind the relevant key so that
you can tell Myth enable/disable captioning, instead of using the
remote for the TV itself.  This can be a problem if you're already
short of buttons on the remote that Myth is listening to.]

(If the various nVidia cards that do VDPAU have the ability to feed
such captioning directly to the TV on line 21 when using their S-Video
outputs, I've sure never heard of it.)

This is something I'm going to be tripping over firsthand once I go
to 0.22 and a VDPAU card; I'd like to take NTSC SD video, transcode to
H.264 to save space, and then play it back on a VDPAU card.  How well
are people finding closed-captioning is doing when thrown into this
mix?  Any advice?

Similarly, I believe you also lose wss support (e.g., the mode that
allows TV's like the Sony WEGA to go to a resolution-preserving 16:9
format by packing all of its lines into a smaller vertical slice of
the screen), although this was uncommon to see in broadcast sources.
(It -was- common to see in DVD sources and was even preserved if you,
for example, recorded a DVD on a VCR and then played the tape at the
TV; it would still go to wss mode, because the signal was likewise
encoded.)  This is probably an uncommon use case for Myth, though.