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Does MythTV work on the station?  Can you watch live tv on the station?

Does MythTV work on the station?  Can you watch live tv on the station?

If you want to know why I need to know this, read paragraphs two and three for an explanation, but if you just want to solve my problem, then skip to the last paragraph.

I have recently gained a little experience with video 'tearing' in LinuxMCE and MythTV.  I have a very decent NVIDIA graphics card that is capable of handling full UI2 (with alpha blending).  The problem was that if I enabled alpha blending, any video playback would have an observable amount of tearing in it.  This is nothing new, and is documented on other parts of this forum.  However, I have noticed something else that causes tearing in MythTV, and if I was a little smarter I could have a solution to it.  I know there are others out there (hopefully reading this) that are much smarter than I am, and could fix (or tell me how) in their sleep.

First of all, video playback never has any tearing when using LinuxMCE - and by that I mean xine.  I noticed some tearing during playback using MythTV.  Then I noticed that it was not all the time; I then proceeded to track it down to the following:  After I play something through Media->Video, MythTV starts to tear.  Before that (right after I reboot), MythTV plays just fine with no tearing.  I noticed that after I play something through Media->Video, it leaves pluto-xine-playback-window open.  If I do a 'sudo killall Xine_Player' then playback once again has no tearing in MythTV.  But if I watch something again through Media->video, MythTV begins tearing again, and on goes the cycle...

All of this to say, I need to know how to add a command that kills the Xine_Player process when you press stop, or select 'Off" from the LinuxMCE menu.  If anyone can help, this would be much appreciated.  Hopefully you can tell from my post that I am not too lazy to figure out the solution to this; I am simply not smart enough.  At any rate, this is an amazing piece of software, I am thoroughly impressed, and have very few problems with it.  Thanks in advance.

We're having no problems with 6200LE & 7300LE here under UI2

Do you have it working with alpha blending, and no tearing in video?  I have an nvidia, and UI2 works great with alpha blending, but there is tearing in the video.  If I switch to UI2 with no alpha blending, the tearing goes away.

I have to say we still see some tearing with alpha blending on... the nVidia drivers are still as good as they could be :-(

Do you have any experience with the fiire products?  I am wondering if they have the same tearing problem with alpha blending.

We're having no problems with 6200LE & 7300LE here under UI2

Do you have it working with alpha blending, and no tearing in video?  I have an nvidia, and UI2 works great with alpha blending, but there is tearing in the video.  If I switch to UI2 with no alpha blending, the tearing goes away.

This may not be the best solution, but it worked for me.  To have your sound output through spdif in KDE by default, add the following code to your asound.conf file:

pcm.!default {
type plug
slave {
rate 48000
pcm "spdif"
}
}

First of all, I am relatively new to LinuxMCE, and my experience has been very good.  I have been using it successfully for a few weeks now, and have come up with a feature request...

I have done a great deal of research about recording premium HD signals, and without going into details, I'll just say that it is not possible.  LinuxMCE has a very nice workaround for live TV that allows you to switch to the direct source and watch in HD with no latency.

I think that LinuxMCE has the potential to have another really nice workaround that involves recording premium HD content.  This is not even that original of an idea, it is just an expansion of something already in production.  Currently, if you want to watch something like ESPN in HD, you can use MythTV's guide to tune to that channel, and then use LinuxMCE to switch to the direct source.  That is very nice, and user friendly, so I think we should come up with a way for recording to work the same way IF you have a cable/satellite provided HD DVR.  The way it would work, is you would look through the MythTV guide, and find a show on ESPN in HD, and you would simply hit the record button on your remote control.  LinuxMCE would then send the necessary commands to your HD DVR to record that show on to the HD DVR.  The program would show up in your recorded shows in MythTV, and LinuxMCE, and you would be able to watch it in standard def that way, and then you would select direct from source much similar to the way that you would with live TV.

One obstacle would be communicating with the cable/satellite provided HD DVR at the level that would be required for this operation.  One possible work around for this, would be for LinuxMCE to simply tune the provided HD DVR to the appropriate channel just before the show is scheduled to begin, and then send the record command.  There are several more obvious obstacles to overcome, but does anyone think that something like this would even be possible?

Thanks in advance for any responses (positive or negative).