Phase #2 progress
Looking back at what I wanted for phase #2:
Heat & Noise
I've mostly achieved this. I didn't replace the fan but managed to quieten it down considerably using active PWM fan-control. It no-longer bothers me. However, the seek-noise of the Barracuda v8 was driving me mad and instead of trying various magic tricks inside the shuttle, I just moved it elsewhere and am mounting it up va NFS. This works great. NFSv3 over 100Mbit provides plenty enough bandwidth to manage LiveTV and a few frontends simultaneously.
I enabled CPU frequency management and tried undervolting but since I had to reset my BIOS recently, I left the CPU voltage alone.
DVD playback
Hmm. I tried using the latest ivtvdev X driver (0.10.1) with a 0.3.5-series ivtv driver with mixed results. Xv was working but I still couldn't get smooth playback on the 350. I also saw general video stability problems, ie. the PVR350 would lock-up after tens-of-minutes of activity.
Unfortunately, I didn't have time to look deeper into the issues and had to resort to the regular ivtv 0.2 driver.
I still don't have DVD playback (or ripped DVD playback or anything other than mpeg2) working but I'm planning on building a VGA->RGB converter and using the ATI VGA output. I now have the necessary components and am leaving my options open on this one...
RGB->svideo converter
Installed this yesterday. The NTL feed certainly looks a little cleaner but I'll need some time to appreciate the difference. While I was at it, I decided to normalise the colour saturation from the PVR350. It has been too strong since day-one and I've reset it to 45 (23400 in the db) for all channels. The default was 63 (32768 in the db).
Supply RGB input to my TV
As far as I'm aware, the PVR350 won't do direct RGB output, despite the chip supporting it. However, I now have the svideo output looking nice and clean. The bundled Hauppauge SCART lead produced nasty artifacts on YUV reds (composite was fine) but the other bundled breakout lead (female svideo, composite and LR audio) provided a good svideo signal. I could feed this into the front ports on my TV but I needed a passive svideo/SCART convertor to feed it into one of the back SCART inputs. I now have this and the PVR350's svideo output looks very nice.
Digital audio out
Not yet working. I spent a while trying to get this up and running and I'm now a little confused. The alsa page states that analogue audio works fine on the IXP150 (it does) with no mention of the S/PDIF. However, the driver itself has a lot of references to the IEC958. There were no errors when trying to use it, I just couldn't hear anything through my amp regardless of mixer settings.
I need to do some more testing and use a 48KHz sample. I also noticed that the atiixp driver has an option for 'S/PDIF over ac-link' (default) or S/PDIF direct. I need to try the later.
4:3/16:9 anamorphic switching
Did some tests with VBI wss signals using the regular 0.2 ivtv driver and actually had my TV sensing and responding to widescreen signals, however it was very unreliable and enabling VBI caused blocking artifacts to appear on the video.
Also did some minor testing with 0.3.5 driver but still couldn't get it to work. I think I must be doing something wrong as this looks like it should work.
Heat & Noise
I've mostly achieved this. I didn't replace the fan but managed to quieten it down considerably using active PWM fan-control. It no-longer bothers me. However, the seek-noise of the Barracuda v8 was driving me mad and instead of trying various magic tricks inside the shuttle, I just moved it elsewhere and am mounting it up va NFS. This works great. NFSv3 over 100Mbit provides plenty enough bandwidth to manage LiveTV and a few frontends simultaneously.
I enabled CPU frequency management and tried undervolting but since I had to reset my BIOS recently, I left the CPU voltage alone.
DVD playback
Hmm. I tried using the latest ivtvdev X driver (0.10.1) with a 0.3.5-series ivtv driver with mixed results. Xv was working but I still couldn't get smooth playback on the 350. I also saw general video stability problems, ie. the PVR350 would lock-up after tens-of-minutes of activity.
Unfortunately, I didn't have time to look deeper into the issues and had to resort to the regular ivtv 0.2 driver.
I still don't have DVD playback (or ripped DVD playback or anything other than mpeg2) working but I'm planning on building a VGA->RGB converter and using the ATI VGA output. I now have the necessary components and am leaving my options open on this one...
RGB->svideo converter
Installed this yesterday. The NTL feed certainly looks a little cleaner but I'll need some time to appreciate the difference. While I was at it, I decided to normalise the colour saturation from the PVR350. It has been too strong since day-one and I've reset it to 45 (23400 in the db) for all channels. The default was 63 (32768 in the db).
Supply RGB input to my TV
As far as I'm aware, the PVR350 won't do direct RGB output, despite the chip supporting it. However, I now have the svideo output looking nice and clean. The bundled Hauppauge SCART lead produced nasty artifacts on YUV reds (composite was fine) but the other bundled breakout lead (female svideo, composite and LR audio) provided a good svideo signal. I could feed this into the front ports on my TV but I needed a passive svideo/SCART convertor to feed it into one of the back SCART inputs. I now have this and the PVR350's svideo output looks very nice.
Digital audio out
Not yet working. I spent a while trying to get this up and running and I'm now a little confused. The alsa page states that analogue audio works fine on the IXP150 (it does) with no mention of the S/PDIF. However, the driver itself has a lot of references to the IEC958. There were no errors when trying to use it, I just couldn't hear anything through my amp regardless of mixer settings.
I need to do some more testing and use a 48KHz sample. I also noticed that the atiixp driver has an option for 'S/PDIF over ac-link' (default) or S/PDIF direct. I need to try the later.
4:3/16:9 anamorphic switching
Did some tests with VBI wss signals using the regular 0.2 ivtv driver and actually had my TV sensing and responding to widescreen signals, however it was very unreliable and enabling VBI caused blocking artifacts to appear on the video.
Also did some minor testing with 0.3.5 driver but still couldn't get it to work. I think I must be doing something wrong as this looks like it should work.
posted by Mezzanine at 12:20 pm
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