> [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Stefan Lucke
> Sent: Thursday, November 04, 2004 4:00 PM
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: [directfb-users] Re: VDR + G400tv out with directfb
>
> Quoting Lucian Muresan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
>
> > > what's the most stable/fast solution for vdr+OSD+(soft mpeg2
> > > decoder)+TVoutput_on_G400 ?
> >
...

> > of the OSD and the video on the same surface (I mean in "our"
> case, the G400
> > TV-out hack-so-far, not as Stefan Lucke originally has written
> it for the
> > *first* head of his Matrox).
>
> Which type of cable do you use for connecting 2nd head to TV ?
> For rgb connection ther are to my knowledge no pre-build cables available.
> Did you solder a vga connector yourself ?

Yes, I soldered one for the *second* VGA connector of my G400 dualhead, to
SCART (RGB) just like in this schematics
http://dzeus.student.utwente.nl/g400/win2kfaq.html#scart_rgb (and I also
added an AV-mode switching signal taken from the blasning, or rgb_enable
signal like this: http://www.muresan.de/htpc/VGA-RGB_SCART_switching.png). I
also have the original Matrox TV-out adapter cable, but I can only use that
one with composite, I don't have S-video capable equipment, and for RGB I
can't find Matrox-typical Mini-DIN7 connector.

> I tested softdevice with TVout from 1st head only for a short time.
> Connection was done via self vga->5_BNC->scart cable.

Cool. Before I had the G400 I also built such an adapter for my G200 PCI (do
you also use such a circuit
http://www.hut.fi/Misc/Electronics/circuits/vga2rgbs.html for adding the
vertical and horizontal sync into composite sync?), but by that time I only
tested it with XFree86, and it was difficult to find a proper modeline. So
that's why your code so far uses the BES for video and the primary layer for
the OSD. I also managed to make that work (I asked some while ago on the vdr
list and you pointed me to that code by that time), but as I only temporary
carry my crappy second monitor for debugging purposes only in the living
room to the htpc, I didn't play too much with it, for me, the puropse is
TV-out :-).

> Field-paritiy should be taken from stream source. I think mpeg2 is usually
> top-field-first wheras dv is bottom-field-first.

All I can say is that when viewing live TV with VDR/softdevice/dfb on my tv,
or play a recording within VDR, I have terrible smearing artifacts on fast
movements and scrolling texts, and when replaying the same VDR recording in
mplayer with triple buffering and most important with top-field-firs parity,
ist's near to perfect, the same VDR recording played in mplayer with
bothom-filed-first parity looks pretty much the same as in softdevice.

> I'll spend some time on dfb out too.

Great to hear! (I hope you mean also  TV-out, not only the primary head
:-) ) Maybe you'll take my suggestion into account and also look into
Ville's dfbmga code, there he very nicely handles several scenarios, but the
most important two of them seem to be either video on the BES and OSD on the
primary FBdev, or video on crtc2 and OSD on the sub-picture layer (hardware
alpha-blended when using YUY2 pixelformat, if I remember well). And of
course, the possibility to choose buffering parameters (single, double or
triple) and most important for TV, the field parity...
I tried several hacks in your softdevice dfbvideoout to acheive this, but
I'm not too knowledgeable about video decoding and DFB yet. I tried to force
the OSD on the subpicture layer (3 in my case), but with no success. I even
tried to change the "cooperation-level" (is it called that way?) from
administrative to exclusive (when trying to use 2 different layers), but
also with almost no success. I once managed to see the a commplete white
screen and no video on my TV, I think it was just the OSD layer. Another
time, just white or grey contours of the OSD, and also no video, just black
behind.
One more thing. With the present softdevice cDFBVideoOut code, the only way
I cand get video AND osd on my TV is forcing layer 0 (my crtc2) for both.
This is unfortunately performed with high CPU usage (it looks very cool
though)

Keep up the good work, I hope I can also help some day soon...

Lucian Muresan



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