On Tue, Jul 22, 2008 at 07:12:35PM +0100, Gavin Hamill wrote:
In the inevitable shift towards HDTV and progressive scanning, I was becoming increasingly concerned that the countless hours of interlaced content would be forgotten in the scramble for new and shiny.
not to forget interlaced formats are still in effect for HDTV. I think you could recycle the basic idea behind my patch for HDTV as well.
Indeed, my own VDR FF based system exists in a large desktop PC case only because of the enormous (and antiquated) FF card. This project leads the way for replacing it with something much more compact, since the card runs hot and it's only a matter of time before it dies.
that originally was one of my major motivations. I don't like a huge VDR box with a FF card in my living room. At least Radeons are also available in low profile format. So are some budget satellite cards.
I hope one day we also could support some on-board graphics (like nVidia or Intel) what would allow tiny VDR boxes with very common hardware.
Is it likely to work with any newer Radeons, or is it because the RV2xx series is the last to have useful full open source drivers? I have a couple of RV3xxs (Radeon X300 + X600 Pro) I'd love to try this with :)
the patch from above basically should run with all cards supported by the xf86-video-ati driver. Just have a look at one of the more recent man pages:
http://cgit.freedesktop.org/~agd5f/xf86-video-ati/tree/man/radeon.man?h=vsyn...
Unfortunately with Radeons we currently have 2 problems unsolved:
1. there appears to be a tiny bug in XV overlay scaling code which sometimes mixes even and odd fields at certain resolutions. A workaround to compensate for this is to scale the opposite way. This is done by xineliboutput option 'Fullscreen mode: no, Window height: 575 px' instead of 'Window height: 575 px' (as noted in my configuration example).
Overlay XV uses double buffering eliminating any tearing effects. This works pretty good.
2. the other way to use XV video extension is textured mode. This method shows very good results. No scaling problems at all. But this code is so new (a few weeks), there even does not yet exist proper tearing protection for.
So for demonstration purposes I still prefer the overlay instead of textured XV adaptor.
"Apparently, some hardware doesn't support interlaced mode. If you have sync problems, check the sync signal with an oscilloscope."
but we are on the safe side. Radeons do support it:)
In fact, my biggest problem with this project before now has been the manufacture of such an adapter - my soldering skills are beyond poor.
just recycle a conventional VGA monitor cable. So you just have to fiddle with the SCART side of the cable.
I don't suppose you'd be willing to make some VGA -> SCART hobby-boxes up for a suitable fee? :)
at least this was not my primary intention:)
Cheers, Thomas