Higher Rez (Or Bigger) Screen

[Padd3r]

I have a feeling that I'm going to want to watch tons of videos on my pandora, but svideo quality doesn't exactly cut it for me. (don't kill me) Ive heard that the dsp core currently isn't working, and until then, HD video will be impossible. So I guess my question is: how hard would it be to put a higher Rez display in the pandora?

 

[mali]

Too hard

 

[mindlord]

I think you're a little confused. The TV out cable is capable of Svideo only, but the Pandora's display is 800x480 which is just a tad bigger than 720p. The DSP is not enabled yet, but should be available in the next major firmware release. High definition movies encoded with Xvid play just fine on the Pandora even without the DSP, but h.264 videos do not.

To answer your question though, no you can't put a bigger screen in the Pandora (at least not easily) and even if you could right now, it wouldn't solve the codec issue, not until the kernel supports the DSP.

 

[Blue Ion]

I think you're a little confused. The TV out cable is capable of Svideo only, but the Pandora's display is 800x480 which is just a tad bigger than 720p.

The pandora screen is smaller, the number corresponds to the number of lines, so 720p is actually 1280x720 which is quite higher than the pandora's screen. Actually the video out resolution is very similar to the pandora's screen, except for the extra blurriness.
If I recall correctly the OMAP chip has three video outputs, two digital and one analogue, but the reason the third one isn't used in something like hdmi (or at least minidisplay port to avoid licences) is that the screens has to has some kind of memory to hold the image, some kind of smart screen.
So if you would like to use the digital output without a hassle, you would have to strip the lcd screen in the process, and everything is very integrated.

I wonder what happened to that idea Craig had once just about that, a pandora with no screen and no battery...

 

[paulguy]

Wouldn't be worth the time or money to make a pandora console that needs to be plugged in. At that poin it'd just be a slow (but small, not a ton of point though) desktop that would cost more than the competition.

Edit, for the original subject, yeah it'd be extremely difficult. You'd probably need a lot of new hardware and a modified case. If someone is up for it and has an elegant solution, it'd be interesting to see.

 

[gaterooze]

On a screen that small, would a higher res display really make much difference?

 

[DaMummy]

if you can see pixels in 720p format on a poandora screen, you need to see an eye doctor, because im sure they want to study your amazing vision

 

[Blue Ion]

On a screen that small, would a higher res display really make much difference?

Actually, I miss a higher resolution for web browsing and in the sense that A LOT of programs aren't prepared for such low resolution, I've put the program bar at the side just to gain some height pixels and see more of some xfce dialogs. Something like 1024x600 would much better as it is also standard netbook resolution and more programs are prepared for it.
But 1280x720 wouldn't hurt as the extra crispiness will be welcomed as long as linux supports a global scaling procedure (which I have the feeling, it doesn't). But I agree that it is too much for the actual eye to notice, see apple so called "retina display" for a hires screen that has to be seen at half a meter to "saturate" the eye.

Finally, an other question is availability, does such screen exists that fits the pandora and can be bought?

 

[Ollonk]

@Blue Ion
My standard use PC is a netbook, resolution 1024x600. Most dialogs are still broken. By most, I mean many in both Gnome and XFCE, and the dialogs for almost every program I've pulled from the repositories in ubuntu or the various sources for SuSe. We would have to have a square screen with unreadable font to make it work. (I have 3 OSs installed, and I even face the problem in Windows at times.)

The bottom line is that an overwhelming majority of programs are designed with the assumption that all screens are 1024x768 or higher. Programs must be hacked to work correctly on netbooks, the Pandora will be even worse.

 

[lulzfish]

But 1280x720 wouldn't hurt as the extra crispiness will be welcomed as long as linux supports a global scaling procedure (which I have the feeling, it doesn't).

How do you mean "global scaling procedure"?

 

[VRAndy]

I think you're a little confused. The TV out cable is capable of Svideo only, but the Pandora's display is 800x480 which is just a tad bigger than 720p.

Just want to emphasize that this is wrong. If you want to express it in television jargon, Pandora's display is a widescreen 480p.

 

[Blue Ion]

But 1280x720 wouldn't hurt as the extra crispiness will be welcomed as long as linux supports a global scaling procedure (which I have the feeling, it doesn't).

How do you mean "global scaling procedure"?

Windows has an option where you can increase the size of everything, where fonts, icons, windows and everything gets bigger without blurring, well except for the icons that do get blurrier as they normally don't have bigger versions.
Problem with such method is that it usually is hit or miss with windows programs, the images of the programs get so badly scaled that looks awful, the layout of some other programs break (moving buttons to places off the window even), or they just don't honor the scaling at all.

I don't know how does it works on linux, but having different gui toolkits, different configurations and the like won't probably help the issue.

 

[tsh]

I don't know how does it works on linux, but having different gui toolkits, different configurations and the like won't probably help the issue.

So it should just be a case of patch the toolkit to generate more sensible dialogues (on the case where they are dynamic), and re-compile? Maybe tablets coming out with portrait (and lowish res) screens will provide some motivation to the devs who usually develop with 23" monitors.

edit: and start filing bugs on apps which ignore the screen size.

 

[Aninhumer]

I think you're a little confused. The TV out cable is capable of Svideo only, but the Pandora's display is 800x480 which is just a tad bigger than 720p.

Just want to emphasize that this is wrong. If you want to express it in television jargon, Pandora's display is a widescreen 480p.

Except it's not wide enough for that because it's a 5:3 screen.

 

[paulguy]

I think widescreen 480p is something like 848x480, but then you can't have a whole number horizontal resolution given 480p and 16:9. It comes to 853 1/3x480. I think most widescreen DVDs have an actual resolution of 720x480, to be scaled by hardware, so you won't be losing a ton on the pandora. Maybe a bit of vertical resolution, but I imagine you could just opt to trim ~24 lines on each side, or just scaling as-is and dealing with slight distortion.

 

[bzar]

Windows has an option where you can increase the size of everything, where fonts, icons, windows and everything gets bigger without blurring, well except for the icons that do get blurrier as they normally don't have bigger versions.
Problem with such method is that it usually is hit or miss with windows programs, the images of the programs get so badly scaled that looks awful, the layout of some other programs break (moving buttons to places off the window even), or they just don't honor the scaling at all.

I don't know how does it works on linux, but having different gui toolkits, different configurations and the like won't probably help the issue.

You mean changing the DPI? Sounds like it.

 

[Padd3r]

Well as for a larger screen - we'd have to take look at what kind of port the screen connects to the board, to me, it seems like all you'd have to do is find some matching ports, cut a bigger hole for the screen, and celebrate by posting a video of your craftmanship on YouTube. Of course, I'm oversimplifying here

edit: Just to be clear, what exactly will the dsp core do on the pandora? (Besides encoding video)

 

[conso]

Maybe we should make a list of oversized dialoges and file bug reports. If the developers don't care, we can still hack them but my guess is most xfce-/gtk-/gnome-developers are aware of the upcoming trend for arm-based netbooks and embedded systems with linux/xfce and happily help out.

 

[typs lik dis]

Well as for a larger screen - we'd have to take look at what kind of port the screen connects to the board, to me, it seems like all you'd have to do is find some matching ports, cut a bigger hole for the screen, and celebrate by posting a video of your craftmanship on YouTube. Of course, I'm oversimplifying here

edit: Just to be clear, what exactly will the dsp core do on the pandora? (Besides encoding video)

Decode video.

 

[WizardStan]

edit: Just to be clear, what exactly will the dsp core do on the pandora? (Besides encoding video)

Decode video.

Any sort of signal processing can be done with the DSP. Things like audio/video (de)compression are typical, but it can also be useful for things like image or audio (ie speech) recognition, pattern matching, and special effects. It'd be useful for handling the midi emulation currently performed on the CPU by timidity which would free up cycles for DosBox, for example.