Hauppauge PVR-350

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Revision as of 18:40, 23 December 2006 by Mjrice (talk | contribs) (How do you resize the MythTV UI and playback overlay to fit the TV screen when displaying X on the PVR-350 video output?)

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Description

The PVR-350

The PVR-350 is a video capture card manufactured by Hauppage. It is supported by MythTV using the ivtv driver.

What it Does & Doesn't Do

Does

  • Excellent Standard-Definition NTSC / PAL TV Out from recorded television (MPEG2)
  • Recording direct to MPEG2, just like PVR-150, PVR-250 and PVR-500
  • Built-in RC5 remote control, supported by LIRC.
  • Audio output from MPEG2 recordings
  • Technically X and xv output are working, but they are slow since they operate over the framebuffer.
  • mythdvd works if set up correctly, but takes a lot of CPU

Doesn't

  • Normal X output at decent speed/quality.
  • OpenGL and hardware accelerated output is not supported.
  • High-Definition (HD) output
  • No audio output from anything but MPEG2 - requires pass-through cable to line-in on sound card for other audio output


Well Suited for: a single-card solution for input/ouput of video and audio to a standard television, running only MythTV and recordings

Not Suited for: Mythvideo, mythmusic, mythgame, other output modes, recordings other than MPEG2

Associated Software

IVTV

Installation guides

Usually found upon install.

FAQs

Best info most likely found on the IVTV driver forum on Sourceforge. See also the wiki at: http://ivtvdriver.org/

How do you send TV-Out audio to the sound card?

Take the L/R audio out and feed it into a L/R female RCA to 1/8 male adapter. Plug this into the line input of your sound card and make sure mute is off.

Displaying X on the PVR-350 video output

Q: How do you resize the MythTV UI and playback overlay to fit the TV screen when displaying X on the PVR-350 video output?

A:
This is one approach, based on a MythTV install created using Jarod's guide [1]. It does not currently resolve the more general problem of the whole X session fitting the TV screen.

  1. Fire up kcontrol:
    1. Go to Desktop->Panels->Hiding
    2. Set "Hide Mode" to "Allow other windows to cover the panel"
  2. In mythfrontend, go to Utilities/Setup -> Setup -> Appearance:
    1. Go Next to the second screen, "Screen settings"
    2. Check off the "Run the frontend in a window" box
      • Note: this step may not be necessary if you are using a different window manager, such as ratpoison. I found it necessary for KDE, so that step 2.1.9. would reposition the GUI properly.
    3. M ake sure "Use GUI size for TV playback is NOT checked
    4. Restart the mythfrontend (if you are set up for autologin, Ctrl+Alt+Backspace will restart the X server and log you back into your mythtv frontend user+session)
    5. Return to the screen in 2.1.1.
    6. Play with the GUI width, height, X offset and Y offset until you can just barely see the lower resizing corners and edge of the upper window box.
    7. (optional) Enlarge the width and height by one step (adds 8 to each count)
    8. (optional) Decrease the X and Y offsets by 4 to re-centre.
    9. The final settings for the NTSC TV used to write this walk-through were as follows:
      • GUI width (px): 616
      • GUI height (px): 456
      • GUI X offset: 46
      • GUI Y offset: 4
    10. The final settings for the PAL TV 4/3 used to write this walk-through were as follows:
      • GUI width (px): 632
      • GUI height (px): 544
      • GUI X offset: 55
      • GUI Y offset: 20
  3. In mythfrontend, go to Utilities/Setup -> Setup -> TV Settings -> Playback:
    1. On the 5th screen, "Hardware Decoding Settings", make sure "Use the PVR-350's TV out/ MPEG decoder" is checked.
    2. On the 8th screen, "Overscan", adjust the over/underscan percentages to your liking. This will resize the overlay when you're watching TV or playing back video.
      • Vertical over/underscan percentage: 8
      • Horizontal over/underscan percentage: 8

Playback Freezes

(Taken from: [2])

You can increase the IVTV buffers by adding the following line to /etc/mythtv/modules/ivtv:

options ivtv yuv_buffers=32 mpg_buffers=16 vbi_buffers=16 pcm_buffers=16 dec_osd_buffers=2

those are the maximum amounts for all those buffers.

then run:

update-modules && rmmod ivtv && modprobe ivtv

If it works, instead of seeing:

ivtv0: Allocate DMA encoder MPEG stream: 128 x 32768 buffers (4096KB total)

you should see:

ivtv0: Allocate DMA encoder MPEG stream: 512 x 32768 buffers (16384KB total)

References

  1. Here is a QuickRef Remote Guide: PVR-350 Remote Quick Guide
  2. XV on PVR-350
  3. IVTV Install