{"id":76,"date":"2007-01-23T22:00:38","date_gmt":"2007-01-24T03:00:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/otac.isa-geek.net\/blog\/?p=76"},"modified":"2007-01-24T11:41:25","modified_gmt":"2007-01-24T16:41:25","slug":"pvr-viewing-woes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/otac.isa-geek.net\/blog\/?p=76","title":{"rendered":"PVR viewing woes…"},"content":{"rendered":"

As my last couple of posts have indicated, my little pet project is the conversion of a refurbished PC as a Ubuntu<\/a>-based PVR. I’ve gotten pretty far, using MythTV<\/a> as the centrepiece for watchin and recording TV shows, DVDs and other media activities. The thing is, I have never actually tried connecting the box to a TV (via the on-board S-Video output) and viewing anything – till now.
\nAs one would expect, (given my record), the TV displayed everything correctly, EXCEPT Linux.<\/p>\n

I was able to view the booting process, right up until Ubuntu actually gives the login screen. Then, the TV displayed a scrambled, wiggly brown colour – completely unviewable. So, what’s going on?<\/p>\n

My research (Google, of course), took me to the following site (HOWTO: NVIDIA TV-OUT for Newbies<\/a>), which gave a hint as to the problem. My refurbished IBM Netvista, carries an integrated NVidia GL card. Apparently there is a known issue with Nvidia cards displaying on TV – it is necessary to reconfigure the \/etc\/X11\/xorg.conf file (for XWindows) to create dual screens (one for a CRT monitor, the other for TV). In addition, I had to modify the default frequency for the TV to 50 MHz. It was originally at 30-60 Mz, which for some reason, caused a problem with my TV. Yours may differ, so be prepared to experiment. I’ve uploaded my own xorg.conf<\/a>, so you can use\/modify for your setup (at your own risk).<\/p>\n

At this point, I now have two displays, virtually side-by-side, with the CRT on the left; moving the mouse to the far right flows onto the second screen shown on the TV. So things are looking up. Hol’ on – how come I can’t play any videos?!
\nSeems like I have more work on dis box. Next time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As my last couple of posts have indicated, my little pet project is the conversion of a refurbished PC as a Ubuntu-based PVR. I’ve gotten pretty far, using MythTV as the centrepiece for watchin and recording TV shows, DVDs and other media activities. The thing is, I have never actually tried connecting the box to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-76","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-linux"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/otac.isa-geek.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/otac.isa-geek.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/otac.isa-geek.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/otac.isa-geek.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/otac.isa-geek.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=76"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/otac.isa-geek.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/otac.isa-geek.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=76"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/otac.isa-geek.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=76"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/otac.isa-geek.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=76"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}