Turns out it is a bug with the ATI drivers using Xvideo. Don't know if its in the ATI driver or in Xvideo (I'm not even sure those are two separate things?). It took me many many hours of googling to find this.
A "sort-of" work around was to use a different playback such as:
# mplayer -ov gl2 <filename>
This works great! Unfortunately that does not solve the mythtv problem because myth appears to use its own internal playback mechanism which only works with Xv. As far as I can tell there is no possible way to adjust this...
BTW, to answer your question, downloaded video had the same problem so its a playback problem, not a capture problem.
So to continue the saga, there are some ati options in xorg.conf that made a difference. One is to set the fglrx driver (fglrx is the proprietary ati driver) to use opengl instead of Xv. Unfortunately that is very CPU intensive. There is also a setting for a texture mode (can't remember the exact name) which worked but caused the hue to be way off (everything was blue/green).
So I removed the proprietary ATI drivers and went back to the xorg "ati" or "radeon" driver. Now, no matter what I do I can not get a stable display on the TV using the SVideo output of the card.
No matter what combination of Horzontal and Vertical sync and display mode always results in a "non-sync" TV display.
Anyone have any suggestions for xorg.conf lines to get a TV monitor working?
I'm thinking at this point the easiest thing to do would be to install a cheap Nvida card.
John
On Wed, 2006-10-11 at 03:19 -0500, Trevor Cordes wrote:
On 10 Oct, John Lange wrote:
When any video is played back on the box it displays "cropped". In other words, the video shows only about the top-left 2/3 of the video. It doesn't matter if its full screen or in a window. Both mplayer and xine exhibit the same behavior and it happens with both live video and recorded clips.
Is it the playback that is cropping or the recording? If you playback a downloaded AVI file, does it have the same problem?
TV or monitor output?
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