Testing the PVR350

Made good progress today. Installed all updates, mythtv-suite, ivtv, lirc and MySQL.

I have a UK-sourced PAL PVR350 feeding a 32" 100Hz widescreen CRT-based Panasonic TV via svideo (for now).

During testing, I found that I needed to use the following to get a clean TVout picture from the 350 (as advised in Jarods HOWTO):

# ivtvctl -u 0xff
# ivtvctl -f width=720,height=576
# ivtvfbctl /dev/fb1 -alpha -on -globalalpha -nolocalalpha

I also used these settings for input/output testing:

# ivtvctl -p 4 (tuner input)
# ivtvctl -p 6 (svideo input)
# ivtvctl -l 0 (svideo+composite output)
# ivtvctl -l 2 (svideo output)
# ivtvctl -K 1 (enable video passthrough)
# ivtvctl -K 0 (disable video passthrough)

Picture quality

The PVR350's tuner is fed via RF from an NTL cable box and most channels look fairly ropey. The same RF lead connected directly to my TV looks ok. Don't now why it looks a lot worse but I won't be using it as an input source after this testing phase.

svideo input from my DVD player looks really good but not as good as a direct DVD RGB->TV hookup, even in passthrough mode. In the past I've noticed that RGB signals look better than svideo on my TV from any given source, however I haven't checked RGB output from the PVR350 yet. Oh, and I had to manually change the TVs aspect ratio to accomodate the anamorphic widescreen signal.

I also tried varying the encoder bitrate and twiddling the vbi settings to see what effect they had (while using dd to pass /dev/video0 to /dev/video16) but the changes didn't appear to have any effect at all so I guess I was doing something wrong.