I finally have a MythTv box up and running with everything mostly working.
I have one final problem which I can not solve.
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.
Adjusting the video capture resolution does not make a difference.
I'm almost certain there must be a video overlay setting or something but having spent most of the weekend searching I'm mystified.
Any tips?
John
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:
John Lange wrote:
Turns out it is a bug with the ATI drivers using Xvideo. Don't know if
[...]
I'm thinking at this point the easiest thing to do would be to install a cheap Nvida card.
That's what I wound up doing... I couldn't be bothered trying to get the ATI drivers to work when the nVidia route was so painless. -Adam
I put a cheap nvidia (Geforce 5200) in last night but I couldn't get it configured properly.
My TV display works, OR my monitor but not both. Is there a tool for auto-detecting and building an xorg.conf file? I've been manually editing this one for days.
I don't intend to have a monitor attached in the long term but unfortunately I still have problems with MythTv not displaying the video at the proper size and shape in the TV Monitor.
Once again, mplayer works flawlessly from the command line giving a nice full screen playback from the tuner but Myth does not display properly in "WatchTV" mode. The GUI looks fine but tuner playback is terrible.
I will say that other than the Xvideo bug (which might actually be in xorg, not the ATI drivers), the ATI drivers and config tools are miles ahead of Nvidia.
I'm not really sure where to go next. I suppose I might try another "build from scratch" in the hopes it will detect the Nvidia card properly at the start.
John
On Thu, 2006-10-12 at 08:26 -0500, Adam Thompson wrote:
John Lange wrote:
If you're using Knoppmyth, /etc/init.d/install-nvidia-debian (/etc/rc5.d/S90install-nvidia-debian) is supposed to autodetect and regenerate the X config at boot time. It doesn't always work, however :-) and you might invoke mkxf86config instead. Although, since you're talking about xorg.conf you probably aren't using Knoppmyth...
I would DEFINITELY install the nvidia binary drivers, and not use the built-in "nv" driver; the TV support (and a bunch of other things besides) work noticeably better. Also, the nvidia binary driver supports Xvmc fully, and there is a special output mode for MythTV that uses the nvidia driver's extended Xvmc support to achieve significantly lower cpu usage.
As an added bonus, the nvidia binary drivers will either generate a correct xorg.conf file for you, or at the very least provide decent documentation on how to fix said file yourself.
-Adam
On Thu, 2006-10-12 at 09:36 -0500, Adam Thompson wrote:
talking about xorg.conf you probably aren't using Knoppmyth...
No, FC5.
Is this a configurable option some place? Where does Myth store its config files? The only configuration I've been able to do is through the front end or mythsetup which only seem to provide very rudimentary controls.
That hasn't been my experience. It generated a broken xorg.conf (which is why my computer monitor is now not working) and I don't see any documentation that outlines what xorg.conf options are available.
Am I missing something?
The ATI drivers come with "aticonfig" which not only automatically sets up your xorg.conf, but also tunes it if you want to change settings latter. And, it also dumps all its options to stdout if you invoke it with no options. Nvidia does not seem to have anything like that.
ATI also supplies several scripts including an uninstall which has been handy.
John
On Thursday 12 October 2006 10:17, John Lange wrote:
I don't see any documentation that outlines what xorg.conf options are available.
On my Ubuntu system, the nvidia documentation is in /usr/share/doc/nvidia-glx/README.txt.gz. If your card supports it, you may want the "TwinView" option to get both a computer monitor and TV out working as one screen.
Thanks. I did in fact find the README on the Nvidia site which lead me to Nvidia's configuration program. After reverting back to my very original xorg.conf file and then running the Nvidia config program I was able to get everything working.
After a few manual tweaks to the xorg.conf file such as "clone" mode I was able to get MythTV working the way I wanted.
John
On Fri, 2006-10-13 at 19:45 -0500, Glen Ditchfield wrote:
Buried in the myth setup are options to change the X Y position of the playback. Try tweaking those.
If the playback is terrible, that's the OSS nv driver. Use the nvidia binary driver instead. FC has prebuilt rpm's that track the kernel, I think it's from livna. Other distros will vary.
You still need to rule out if it's a recording or playback problem. Try recording a 15-60 sec clip and email me the .NUV file and I'll tell you.
On 11 Oct, John Lange wrote:
Turns out it is a bug with the ATI drivers using Xvideo. Don't know if
Oops... I had missed this earlier email of yours. You had answered some of my questions already I see.
This entire quote doesn't make sense. You're saying that playing something with mplayer -ov gl2 works ok but playing a downloaded video (not a NUV file) does not? What are you using to play a downloaded video? Myth just uses mplayer internally I believe for non-NUV file playback. Therefore a downloaded file, if it plays properly with mplayer outside of myth should play ok inside of myth too!
I'm still curious to see if your NUV files are ok or not. You know, you can play NUV files on XP now using some .NUV reader available somewhere (sourceforge?). Works well but causes equal-width black bars to be to the left and right when I playback my Plextor-created DIVX/MPG4 NUV files. But you could use that to test.
I'm probably barking up the wrong tree with the recording-flaw theory, but in situations like this you must eliminate things in every step of the process.
Anyone have any suggestions for xorg.conf lines to get a TV monitor working?
Haven't tried yet, but will soon(ish). All my myth is through computer monitors.
On Thu, 2006-10-12 at 12:47 -0500, Trevor Cordes wrote:
Back when I was using the binary ATI drivers; playback of both liveTV (from the tuner) and from a file was borked using Xvideo playback no matter what tool was used (Myth, mplayer, Xine).
However, using mplayer with the gl2 playback looked fantastic on both liveTV and on files. Myth has no option for gl2 playback of LiveTV. For playback of files Myth uses mplayer (as you stated). So yes, playback of files works fine in and out of Myth as long as you use the -xv gl2 option with mplayer (or Xine if you configure it that way).
That would assume I have a windows machine which I do not.
Agreed. I feel I have eliminated capture as the problem but will perform one final test this evening to confirm.
John
On 12 Oct, John Lange wrote:
However, using mplayer with the gl2 playback looked fantastic on both
Ah, it's making more sense now.
Since you're using FC5, as am I, you definitely want the nvidia binary driver then everything should start being mostly peachy.
You want kmod-nvidia or kmod-nvidia-smp from livna yum repo (easiest way and livna is a reasonable repo without the problems of something like atrpms).
Or DIY with the drivers from nvidia, but you must rejig them everytime you upgrade the kernel then, which gets to be a pain.
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Adam Thompson -
Glen Ditchfield -
John Lange -
Trevor Cordes