[MPlayer-users] TV output cards

[Michael Hunold]

Hello Paul,

> I am considering buying an Sigma Hollywood plus mpeg card
> (http://www.realmagic.com/products/hollywood_plus.htm), to get proper TV
> out with mplayer. What I want is to be able to use my X, and see video
> on my TV from the same computer, and support for Dxr3 output looks like
> what I need.


Well, basically it's just the thing you need. I recently bought one of 
these -- here are my 2 cents about it.

- First of all, it has an excellent picture and both an s-video and a 
composite ouput. Under Windoze, it just very nicely -- it makes a full 
featured dvd-player.

But beware that you can only have the dvd showing on your monitor if you 
use the loop-through cable -- the card does not do any real overlay 
video as a tv-card does. But with the loop-through cable, the signal 
quality really suffers...

But I don't mind, since I only use the composite output of the card.

- You need to know that the card is a hardware mpeg-decompressor, so it 
can only show mpeg-1 or mpeg-2 streams by default, ie. for watching dvds 
  this is completely ok. The only solution to watch divx movies however, 
is to decode the video and then to recode it to mpeg-1 on-the-fly. Of 
course you need some computing power to do this...

- At the moment, the dxr3 ouput plugin for mplayer does not fully work. 
The video is choppy and not a fun to watch. But the plugin is actively 
maintained by David Holm who is working on this issue. Hopefully this 
problem will be solved soon.

- Alternatively, you can try and use xine. There, the dxr3 output works 
allright -- but only for dvds. I wasn't able to compile in the 
on-the-fly mpeg-1 compression stuff, because xine uses "librte" (rte - 
real time encoding). "librte" is undergoing some major reconstruction at 
the moment, so it currently does not even compile... And I haven't found 
an old version of "librte" to compile xine with.

But since mplayer is my favourite player, I don't mind too much about this.

> The question is if the card will send wide-screen DVDs/avis properly to
> my TV?


For DVDs, this is definetely the case, since the dxr3 completly decodes
the dvd mpeg-2 video stuff completely by itself.

For avis, I'm not quite sure. I have some weird avis here, for which the 
"xv" ouput computes the correct aspect ratio, while the "dxr3" output is 
completely messed up. But I did not want to bother David with this, 
until he finsihed fixing the most urgent bugs.

> Thanks
> Paul Fleischer


Feel free to ask some more questions.

CU
Michael.