Date: Wed, 12 Feb 1997 23:49:35 -0500 From: Randall Hopper <rhh@ct.picker.com> To: Amancio Hasty <hasty@rah.star-gate.com>, Luigi Rizzo <luigi@labinfo.iet.unipi.it> Cc: multimedia@freebsd.org Subject: Good results with Wincast/TVdbx Message-ID: <19970212234935.45164@ct.picker.com> In-Reply-To: <199702120504.VAA26988@rah.star-gate.com>; from Amancio Hasty on Feb 02, 1997 at 09:04:23PM References: <19970211232548.58351@ct.picker.com> <199702120504.VAA26988@rah.star-gate.com>
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Well, more progress and much better results this evening with the new
Wincast/TVdbx. I tweaked Luigi's TV so it'll do 8bpp, 15bpp, and all
weighting permutations of 16bpp with any card. It special-cases 555 16bpp
so that it can use the bcopy instead of the pixel-by-pixel color
conversion, so needless to say I get a much better frame rate with that
weighting. :-) In 555 16bpp, it's pretty fluid even at 640x480. But I need
to put back in the latency delays (I ripped them out yesterday) as it dogs
the system a little now. I think I'll probably be able to throttle back to
CAP_SINGLE as well.
My original problem with only seeing the odd scan-line frame update
consistently was due to the latency introduced by the pixel color conversion
in TV. Flipping into CAP_CONTINOUS smooths over this and gives a
"near"-perfect display for the modes that require conversion. The static I
was seeing yesterday in CONTINOUS was me not adjusting the tracking on my
VCR :-)
Questions/Problems:
1) I needed to kick in at least one CAP_SINGLE ioctl to the bktr
driver before going CAP_CONTINOUS for the driver to enable the
miniplug audio-out jack on the Wincast card (which is plugged into
line-in on my soundcard). It seems a CAP_CONTINUOUS ioctl didn't
enable this audio output.
Is this a feature or maybe a bug?
2) Every so often, my whole system will just freeze up. Mouse &
cursor dead, Ctrl-Alt-Backspace and console escapes
ignored--nothing, zip, nada.
It only happens after I've run tv one or more times, but I've had
it happen once while tv was running. I'll update to 2.2-GAMMA this
weekend and see if that helps.
In general though, what's the best approach for debugging a system
freeze?
3) Latency from doing color conversion on the CPU still leaves a
little artifacting in CAP_CONTINOUS mode due to the CPU and the
driver reading/writing at different rates.
When I get my Bt848 info, I'll investigate pushing the color
conversion onto the card for all video modes. Seems like I read
in the Hauppauge promo info that the card can do this.
Also in 15bpp/555-16bpp/24bpp, I can probably throttle back to
CAP_SINGLE which should fix it if the capturecard-mem-mem-videocard
copies alltogether are typically faster than the frame rate. Doing
color conversion on the card would cover it for all the other
modes too.
And color conversion + a capturecard-videocard single DMA transfer
per frame would be a real peach. The '95 Wincast TV program does
this I believe (great framerate, no artifacts, and low CPU!).
I'm having a good time. Thanks for a great driver!
Amancio Hasty <hasty@rah.star-gate.com>:
|You need the B848 Databook from Brooktree if you want to hack on the
|driver, period.
I put it on order last Monday. I'm hoping it'll be here before the weekend.
|What is your CPU and motherboard chipset, example Natoma or Triton...
Triton, 33Mhz PCI bus, 66Mhz mem bus (P100). Seems like you indicated in
past mail this was the best o' the bunch for high-throughput PCI transfers.
|The driver does not have the ioctls to transfer video to memory and
|is not hard to add . I can provide this feature before the end of
|the week;however, if you want to take advantage of this feature
|then you will have to ask the XFree86 team or peruse thru their
|release notes for an appropiate video card which supports linear
|frame buffering.
Please do! I need to check to see if the ARK2000 driver linear maps the
frame buffer, ...but I don't really care: In past months, I'd about sold
myself on upgrading to an 8Meg card and a bigger monitor, and the Bt848
driver/Wincast experience has been enough to lock-in that decision ;-)
Just as soon as I feature shop a bit, I'm gonna buy. Any recommendations
would be appreciated.
Thanks for the other info, Amancio. And I'm certainly interested in your
results with dtv and capturecard-to-videocard DMA transfers.
Randall
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