[vdr] Xineliboutput: can achieve similar to softdevice's mgatv option?

[Alasdair Campbell]

On 20/04/07, Markus Schuster <ma.schuster at gmx.de> wrote:
> Am Donnerstag, 19. April 2007 15:06:54 schrieb Alasdair Campbell:
> > config_xineliboutput
> >
> > # field parity
> > # { none  top  bottom }, default: 0
> > #video.device.directfb_field_parity:none
>
> That's funny, my config_xineliboutput doesn't have this config option per
> default...
> But I can insert it and when set to 'top' video quality is quite awesome, but
> there are still some small hickups and stutters here and there (even with
> vsync set to 1). Maybe some other settings are still missing, that softdevice
> sets...

I've noticed problems with a couple of music video channels where
there's an effect similar to a stuck CD, surely related to field sync
but probably down to poorly transmitted content. I'm not experiencing
any problems with my favourite channels.

> With Bloomberg (German news/stock channel) I see a very odd behavior: To have
> to video itself fullscreen, I have to enable local frontend scaling but then
> the OSD is renderd much too big. So I have to enable OSD resizing/downscaling
> which results in a very unnice OSD (fonts look a bit ugly and the complete
> OSD is not the nicest view.).
> And channels broadcasting a 16:9 signal are always scaled up to my 4:3 CRT TV,
> so I have the typical 'long faces' (I think that's only a configuration
> setting, but I haven't been able to locate it...)

My experiences with a 16:9 TV are different but theres some issues
with scaling & OSD that I would like to fix..

I don't want 4:3 content to stretch to my widescreen tv, so I set
Video > Crop letterbox 4:3 to 16:9 - NO
OSD > Everything here is set to NO or OFF

This isn't a bad setup, with 4:3 content, the OSD area shrinks
horizontally to 4:3 ratio, but the text stays nice and clear - I
noticed that any scaling of the OSD results in quite poor text.

However :-), I would prefer it if the OSD stayed at 16:9 resolution
all the time, with just the video layer beneath changing per content
aspect ratio. I'm not sure how I could cause this, or even it it's
possible with the framebuffer.

> I'm currently not in a productive environment (that runs with a FF and VDR
> 1.26 :)) with software decoding, but from what I can say so long, using
> DirectFB and the Matrox G450s TV-Out, softdevice is my personal favorite! I
> think xineliboutput doesn't earn it's high version number in this 'special'
> configuration.
> BUT I have to admit that xineliboutput uses only half of the CPU power of
> softdevice, so it's video decoder has to be more efficient...

Because I'm using a 550Mhz P3, my only option is to use the
xineliboutput until I figure out what is causing the big CPU load
variations. As I've never had softdevice successfully running on this
television, I can't really say anything about it's quality, though I
know there's been lots of work in respect to the matrox cards.

all the best,


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