TV-Out is a little quirky

[PokeParadox]

Long story short is that MarkoeZ sent me a TV-Cable he'd hacked together and I've had chance to play with it.


I noticed that using the "toolbox" on the XFCE menu to enable TV-out only gives crappy composite and there are no options for Svideo.


In order to enable Svideo TV-out, you have to delve into the the settings menu and run the full application.


From there I had to create some new profiles to enable the Svideo settings. This profiles are not avialable to the little menu "toolbox"


So good I finally have a nice crisp Svideo 60fps image, but Gpsp doesn't like it... it refuses to start with TV-out enabled on HW scaler. And finally the whole different TV-out modes, it's not end-user friendly - is there no method to detect what the application is doing and adjust the TV-out mode automatically (from Main layer to HW scaler)


So in summary - TV-out it's nice but has some usability issues that will probably bug a lot of end-users.

 

[ekianjo]

Seeing the ridiculously little ratio of people who have tv cables, this is probably the lowest priority of the OP team

 

[frefol]

I'll have to double check when my Pandora returns next week but I'm fairly certain that when I was testing the cable I built, the TV-out on the toolbox was set to S-Video on mine. I turned on the tv out and went into the actual tv out settings and it was set on the S-Video setting and the colors all looked fine.

 

[TrashyMG]

The Svideo TV out cable I created just works fine.. And the Pandora seemed to default to SVideo out for me.. Generally I run PAL mode because of the better resolution, which amazingly my American television seems to like fine.

 

[ekianjo]

S-video on my cable has a problem with the blues - all the other colors render fine but some blues produce garbage on screen.

 

[notaz]

And finally the whole different TV-out modes, it's not end-user friendly - is there no method to detect what the application is doing and adjust the TV-out mode automatically (from Main layer to HW scaler)

That would require a daemon that would poll the state constantly, I'd rather not have that. And as always, there is not enough people doing firmware stuff (actually no people at all at the moment).

 

[PokeParadox]

Notaz, I know you have enough on mate, if there was something in the FW that I thought I could help with... I would.

 

[notaz]

Well you could do the xfce config button and tv-out config profile sync thing quite easily I think. The configbutton source is here:


https://github.com/b.../plugin/tvout.c


..and tv profiles are stored in /etc/pandora/conf/tvout-profiles.conf


So instead of hardcoded options in tvout.c you could do simple sscanf loop to parse tvout-profiles.conf and generate proper labels and arguments for /usr/pandora/scripts/op_tvout.sh (you can run that script manually to get usage help). When done, send pull request to slaeshjag and ping me or ED, we can then pull it in OE build system.


The automatic layer selection could probably be done by configbutton too. When enabled, it could spawn a thread to watch /sys/devices/platform/omapdss/overlay1/enabled , when this file has '1' it could switch the tv to overlay, otherwise back to main layer. It could only keep the thread active while tv-out is on to not interfere with idle power saving.

 

[PokeParadox]

No promises, but I will have a little look into this. Thanks for the mentoring!

 

[BAFelton]

Gpsp works on old kernel :

 

[PokeParadox]

Ok - I have got this far: http://pastebin.com/bEiXa4Tg


I don't understand the size commands of the tvout script... Not tried to compile it either.

 

[slaeshjag]

Try compiling it and running it yourself. If you can't find any bugs, I can push it to master. Then, it should appear in the next firmware upgrade.

 

[PokeParadox]

Hahaha... yes that is the idea - just haven't had the right moment to do so. I'll try today I guess.


EDIT: We have compilation - after a couple of compile issues...


So let's see how testing goes...


EDIT: It does... something - I get a menu with tv icons and no string - probably doing something stupid with my C-strings... clicking on all of them doesn't affect TV-out mode... additionally standard TV-out submenu also appears... most confusing.


EDIT: It's creating the correct number of entries for the lines in the config file... so it's just not parsing the string properly... *grumble*

 

[NearTao]

If you're still working on this put the code in pastebin again and send me a PM or write in this topic... I'll try and take a peak at what's going on.

 

[PokeParadox]

sure thing! I'll try and sort that out after work.

 

[NearTao]

Heh no problem... if I had to guess it's probably a pointer issue or something else that's likely to be simple but not obvious...

 

[PokeParadox]

http://pastebin.com/UJRtMsRy


I believe that is my latest code!

 

[slaeshjag]

It's not C++, you can't compare with a constant string like that


EDIT: And string copy is not as easy as =

 

[PokeParadox]

lol... Yeah... I'm more comfortable with C++, looks like it shows!

 

[NearTao]

Do you have enough to go on from slaeshjag or do you need more of a leg up for this project?