TVapp Project Status

As at 20-Nov-2002:

The first milestone for me, is to be able to sit down and watch through a whole DVD without having any noticable problems. I don’t necessarily need a remote control, or anything fancy, but I need to be able to forget about my creation enough to enjoy the film.

To that end, the current remaining obstacles are:

• the Pioneer DVD is really quite noisy. The DVD-116 seems not to slow down in response to using the hdparm utility with the -E parameter. I downloaded a Pioneer utility for DOS/Windows that is supposed to slow the drive down to quieten it down, but have not yet had a chance to try it out.

• My current patch to the Trident X driver spins in a loop waiting for vertical retrace in order to eliminate video tearing during playback. As a consequence of this, there sometimes isn’t enough CPU time left over to actually decode the MPEG stream, and mplayer starts to lose audio/video synchronization after a while. I think I need to patch the mplayer Xv output driver to tell the main loop of mplayer that it’s doing the timing. Some digging shows this is done by returning VFCAP_TIMER from query_format in the video output driver (=vo_xv.c=). Note from 21-Nov: after testing this fix, it doesn’t seem to make any difference to the problem.