Date: Thu, 13 Feb 1997 03:06:29 -0800 From: Amancio Hasty <hasty@rah.star-gate.com> To: Randall Hopper <rhh@ct.picker.com> Cc: Luigi Rizzo <luigi@labinfo.iet.unipi.it>, multimedia@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Good results with Wincast/TVdbx Message-ID: <199702131106.DAA11682@rah.star-gate.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 12 Feb 1997 23:49:35 EST." <19970212234935.45164@ct.picker.com>
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>From The Desk Of Randall Hopper : > > 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 :-) I forgot to mentioned that the driver does not wash windows nor does it control the weather 8) > 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. You got me there since the driver has no notion of the audio out it is a *video* capture board and it is a side effect on the driver that the audio managed to be enabled on your card. It is interesting though. > Is this a feature or maybe a bug? I consider this a definite feature 8) > > 2) Every so often, my whole system will just freeze up. Mouse & > cursor dead, Ctrl-Alt-Backspace and console escapes > ignored--nothing, zip, nada. This may be a problem related to your X server cause I dont get any crashes over here on my P100 nor on my PPRO 200Mhz. > 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? Just start tv from a virtual console and make sure that you have compile the kernel for debugging. See the FreeBSD handbook about debugging the kernel and generating crash dumps. > 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. You can implement other video modes , rgb8 , rgb16, etc.. not hard to add once you see what I have done for 32 bits and 15 bits. > 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!). Nope the Win95 client , does capturing okay, it does retry very well 8) And the output to the display is slow slow and slow. the capture utility probably just uses the cap class to grab the frame then uses GDI or DIB both are slow . Your frame rate will go way up once you get a decent or well supported vga card for sure you will leave Win95 in the dust. Well, at least thats the case over here . Bettina: Why is the video display so slow? Amancio: Sorry babe, I am running Win95 . 8) Bettina: Oh, Okay it is much faster on FreeBSD... > |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. Cool , I am glad that you don't have a Mercury chipset. I would go with an S3 968 with 4MB of VRAM for video stuff and FreeBSD stuff. There are naturally other choices if you don't care about FreeBSD like an S3 Virge with VRAM support not the one with DRAM. Cheers, Amancio
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