The PVR saga continues…

Current Specs:

• New quieter case: Antec Aria
• New mobo: ASRock P4VM800 – P4 1.8GHz, VIA Chipset
• New video card: Nvidia GeForce 5200
• New Keyboard: ACK-580

The remainder of the stuff is the same as my first attempt. I’ve decided to use a video card to drive The TV so I can get the 16:9 aspect ratio (which isn’t possible with the PVR-350 card’s tv out).

I’m unable to get the Nvidia card to display at The TV‘s native resolution (1366×768) so I’m using 1024×768 and The TV is scaling it up. Not perfect I know, but good enough for now.

To get the correct aspect and screen dimensions in X11 (and xine) I added the following to the “Monitor” section my XF86Config-4 file:

DisplaySize  600 330

To get the correct aspect ratio when playing video files I had to modify the mplayer settings in Utilities/Setup -> Setup -> Media Settings -> Videos Settings -> Player Settings:

/usr/bin/mplayer -monitoraspect 16:9 -fs -zoom -quiet -vo xv %s

I gave up on using the PVR-350 remote, there were too many times I ended up needing to switch to a keyboard. I replaced it with an IR keyboard (the ACK-580 from Directron) which works great. The range is excellent, however I cannot get the mouse pad thingie (in the upper right hand corner) to work. It works well on a Windows machine (Ick! I feel sullied!) but I cannot get X11 to see it.

Overall, I’m pretty happy. Some things I’m still want to work on/tweak:

• Get automatic comercial skipping to work reliably.
• Figure out how to transcode recorded shows to Mpeg4 to reduce their size.
• Get torrentocracy working.