[linux-dvb] Re: Multimedia PC with budget card

["Dr. Juergen Pfennig" <info@j-pfennig.de>]

On Saturday 14 August 2004 14:13, Denis Cheong wrote:
> That would be 720x576, which is full screen PAL in just about anybody's
> language.  The overscan however will wreak havoc on the output if your
> video is not deinterlaced (because it will modify the actual number of
> lines output).  I'm not all that impressed with the TV output for these
> reasons but I think there's some tweaking that can be done.

Winischhofer has a tool called siscntl which helps your tweaking the driver. I 
turned all filter options off and adjusted the image width so that it results 
in a little bit off overscan, which is not nice for KDE but good for movies. 
I did some testing switching between analog SAT TV and digital output. I 
agree that the analog image still has a slightly higher bandwidth (looks 
sharper) but the digital image has no (colour-)noise.

> The pundit supports ACPI so you can send it to sleep and wake it up in
> only a few seconds, why not do that?  I never turn mine off anyway.

ACPI does not work reliably with SuSE 9.1. Even Windows 2000/2003 don't work 
100% perfect with these pundits. I will wait a few more years before using 
ACPI, even with windows. A definite don't like for the pundit is it's high 
power consumption of 13 Watts in standby mode. They could really look for a 
better power supply.

> Some other gotchas that you missed:
>
> 1. The PCI card slots in the Pundit are not *quite* full height.  Cards
> that extend past the top of the backplane will *really* stretch the
> space limits in the Pundit.  The Technotrend / Hauppauge cards are such
> cards (and so are the CI cards), so you will have a sh*t of a time
> getting them to fit into a Pundit.  They will fit, I managed to do it
> (and the case even fits back together), but you will need to disassemble
> far more than was originally intended to be disassembled to do it.

My TV-Card is small enough (KNC-1). Hauppauge is too expensive what is it good 
for? But you are right, backbones offer little space. Most TV/Radio programs 
in Germany are not scrambled.

> 2. The Pundit comes configured with automatic fan speed set "off" in the
> BIOS - this makes the CPU fan run at full speed all the time, which is
> quite noisy.  The first thing you'll want to do for a HTPC is to turn
> this automatic fan speed setting "on".

Only one of two had this setup. But that's easy to fix.

> 4. The major limitation of the Pundit for me is that the S/PDIF optical
> output is on the *front* of the case, ...

I like the ieee1394 connector at the front-side and I never use S/PDIF but I 
would also dislike such cabeling in my living-room.

So, let's have fun and let us hope that our next buy will be a similar 
success.
Jürgen