Hi Marius, many thanks for trying out tvtime, we greatly appreciate it! Marius Kotsbak (marius@xxxxxxxxxxx): > > tvtime is a high quality television application for use with video > > capture cards. [...] > > > Bugs: > -Volume, mute doesn't work. It is probably changing wrong sound > channel if it isn't using the one at the tvcard. This one is new, thanks. I submitted a bug on our sourceforge page. We had a bit of a hard time trying to figure out what to mute, and I guess we need to try a bit harder. :) > -changing channel with arrow up/down hangs it! This has been resolved. It actually doesn't hang it, tvtime is searching for the next channel with a signal. Unfortunately it takes alot of time to do this, especially if there are many blank channels between those active. It's not an issue for myself or doug, since we both have like 80 cable channels with only a couple dead ones near the extremes. tvtime in CVS now lets you switch to blank channels, and we're throwing in support for the xawtv config file/scantv output now. > -typing in a channel using numbers is hard. It requires 4 digits, and > I can't make it. This sounds strange. It doesn't require 4 digits, hit two digits and then hit keypad-enter. If it's difficult though, then I suspect you are dropping frames. See below. > Missing features: > -native LIRC-support Should be easy to do. I'll make a note of this. > -overlay support Traditional V4L overlay is broken, it does not work with cards that have protected framebuffers like the nVidia cards. It's not a robust design. The more correct method is to use the "v4l" module of XFree86, but this has problems: tearing, at best half-resolution, and at best half-framerate of the original signal. While I'm probably going to put in support for the "v4l" X module, it does defeat the purpose of tvtime's processing. Sort of an in-between solution, I'm putting in support for some low-CPU modes into tvtime. > -channel setup, so you can assign channels to 1,2,3 etc so you don't > have to remember the actual channel numbers. This should be done soon. > And: > What exactly is the advantage of this one over other like zapping. > This requres much CPU-power, and I can't see any difference in > quality. I'm using pinnacle PCTV and watching PAL broadcasts. Based on your comment about typing in channel numbers, I suspect you are dropping frames. I'm going to put something in the titlebar or bottom-right corner of the output to indicate when dropped frames occur. In the mean time, while running tvtime, please hit 'd' a few times to print out profiling information about how long we spend in each part of our main loop. If you could email those to me I would greatly appreciate it. Also, try out some of the different deinterlacing modes (you can cycle through them using the 't' key) to get a feel for what tvtime is doing. A good way to see the difference between tvtime and other TV apps is to compare on a news channel with alot of generated and scrolling text. An example here is CNN or CNN headline news. With tvtime, the text will be much more readable, and scrolling text much more smooth. Some newer filters will be added to reduce artifacts like chroma crawl and use heuristics to reduce noise. These will also help out alot, at the price of more CPU. Another feature of tvtime will be film detection, which is what I'm working on porting now from DScaler. Film detection is a big help in quality when viewing material that is originally at 24 or 25fps, as if you can detect the sequence correctly, you can reconstruct the original full-resolution frames. tvtime is intended to be used for large or full-screen tv viewing. If you're just watching in a little window, there is no point in doing most of our processing, and it is for this reason that I will throw in support for the "v4l" module. -- Billy Biggs vektor@xxxxxxxxxxxx
