Have just spent much of the day getting the tv out working on my brand spanking new pvr 350.

It seems to record programs well enough, it plays back recorded programs with sound and everything Far better than the tv out on the inbuilt nvidia card on my XPC box.

My problem is playing back movies (divx mainly) is slow and choppy, I know this is a known issue, and there is no sound ? Is the lack of sound a related issue or something else ?

Is the version of mplayer prepatched with anything to help playback on the 350 ?

Are there any suggestions to improve movie playback easily. I can't face recompiling mplayer or the kernel

My last question is the live TV picture (PAL) is shaky. It wobbles about the screen just a little bit. As far as I know I have everything set up correctly but I do remember seeing a page somewhere which discussed this problem. Could someone please give me a pointer.

Thank you for your time.

Douglas

well not sure about the PAL thing, but basically the answer on the movie playback is you are stuck. nothing exists at all to help that at this moment. people are working on it, but that I know of no patches recompiling or anything else can get good movie divx/xvid playback on pvr350 tvout sound is another issue. to get sound you will have to patch it in somehow. I know it can be done, but I've never personally use a 350, so don't know the specifics.

The TV picture is still a bit shaky. Both on live TV and playing back recorded problems.

I discovered that recording progs reset the video input. I solved that easily enough by removing all the extra unused inputs I had defined in mythtv-setup.

The main thing is the sound. TV and playback of recorded TV is fine. I am using the cable that came with the card that plugs directly into the scart socket on my telly. I have plugged the audio cable from this into the output of my sound card, is this right ?

Douglas

Sound: if you have a PVR350 and TVout, sound for liveTV and recorded programs will be through the card's "out" connector (composite, S-VHS, audio left & right). Sound for videos will be coming through your computer's soundcard. So, you need to have your soundcard working and plugged into something.

Choppy video: use the "-framedrop" option in the command line parameters for mplayer, found in the MythVideo configuration options

Sound and "fast" video for mplayer with PVR350: people are working on this. There are patched versions of mplayer available that are supposed to make good use of the PVR's video out. They don't work for me yet, so I am stuck using the "-vo x11" option, with "-framedrop" to keep sound and video in sync.

I forgot...

Shaky image: you need to match the size of the recordings to the PAL standard. For example, use 720x576 as recording size and liveTV size to avoid the shaky video. I think 360x576 also works.

Well I finally found the settings for changing the recording size which worked very well. Near perfect.

I tried all kinds of looping sound cables round and in and out of various cards etc. No joy. So I ended up with the following: sound from TV card into telly, sound from sound card into Hi Fi which works quite well.

Recording works fine though sadly I can't find a grabber for the uk sci fi channel.

I tried to set up the Tuner 0 input but could not get it to work. But this is no great trauma as it was only for Eastenders for my beloved wife.

The colour balance on recorded programmes seems to tend slightly towards he red still. Photo's are fine so I am presuming it is on the recording side. Though as it is still far better than the nvidia TV output I'll survive.

On the whole I am very happy with my setup so far. Hopefully at some point soon the problem with the rubbish divx playback will be sorted.

What would be nice is a command line to rip DVD's in a suitable format for the PVR card. Or is this not possible as I would still have to use mplayer to watch it?

Thank you again,

Douglas