malformed.org does the blog thing

For a while I had s-video working fine with my new TV (JVC HD-52Z575), but I was using the stretch feature on the TV to make the 800×600 into a 16×9 resolution, and the stretched out people were starting to get to me, so I decided I was going to figure out how to get 16×9 out of my computer.

Obviously this would only help if I had 16×9 content, but that was fine with me (and I could always use mythtv’s stretch/zoom features if I wanted it back the other way).

There’s not a lot of documentation about getting different resolutions with s-video, and even less for svideo and linux. After being frustrated for a while, I decided that I needed to use the component inputs on my TV instead of s-video or HDMI (I didn’t want to pay like $100 for a cable).

It turned out to be quite hard to find a video card with component out. I read somewhere that some nvidia cards do have a breakout box of some sort that does it, so I decided to find what I could locally (I probably could have done it more easily online, but I was frustrated by this point and wanted it *now*.).

Since I’m avoiding fry’s whenever possible (too far away, hellish traffic, generally crappy selection), and there aren’t a lot of other options, so I went to best buy first. They had an nvidia 6200 that appeared to have something like component out, but I couldn’t see into the box very well, and their theft-proof plastic case had an opaque side to it which covered up the list of features. It said something on the front about how it had “svideo/HDTV output”, and I asked an employee if that meant it had component out, and he didn’t really know and said something about how he thought it was DVI, since most widescreen TVs come with DVI in now (which I don’t think is true), so I gave up on that.

I then went to compusa (boy, does it look small in there now compared to frys or even best buy), and they had the same card (for $25 more), but their theft proof case had the opaque side on the other end, so I could see the feature set, and it really sounded like it would have component out, so I decided to get it and return it if it didn’t work. I went back to best buy (to save the $25), and then opened it in the car before even leaving. It had an output on the back of the card that looked like svideo but with more pins, and a dongle that plugged into that that gave svideo, component, and composite outputs. Hurrah!

So after taking that home and swapping out the card I had, the next task was to get it working with mythtv and hdtv resolutions. After trying some stuff I found online, I went to #mythtv-users on irc to find out about performance tweaks. Boy, that place can be frustrating. There are some really smart and helpful people, and then there are some where their greatest benefit to the community would be disappearing into the ether. You can read some of my questions on beirdo’s irc logs. The problem ended up being the denoising options I had picked. But wow, when you get the right options chosen, it sure makes a HUGE difference in the quality.

Although it probably isn’t perfect, and has some extra things, the XF86Config-4 config file is available for perusal.

The things to be fixed on my mythtv setup are overscan and digital audio, then it’ll be pretty much done (although there’s of course constant tweaking..)