Hi,
Now I've put the Sony TV back together, I couldn't resist trying to find some way of seeing what I'm getting from the PC. I've not sorted out a VHF modulator yet, but remembered that if you push both the UHF and VHF buttons in together, the Sony 9-90UB will do 405-line on UHF, with negative modulation, FM sound etc. So all I needed was a bog-standard UHF modulator out of something. One of my dead Atari ST collection was duly raided and the modulator bodged onto my lash-up RGB+sync to monochrome composite converter.
Given everything that's wrong, the results aren't bad. And can be improved on.
- TV frame linearity poor, won't adjust out with rear-panel height and frame linearity presets.
- RGB+sync converter is terrible, need to make a better one (work is in progress on this.)
- Cheating by using UHF - need to build VHF modulator.
- Digital terrestrial card bought for this project was DOA - currently using analogue 'frame-grabber' card - analogue signal noisy, can't capture at decent resolution [1]
- Font size for programme guide needs tweaking, it's unreadable.
- MythTV user interface currently overscanned and needs tweaking.
[1]MythTV buffers live television (so you can pause and slow-motion etc.) When using a frame grabber card the software encodes grabbed frames to mpeg, writes this to disk, reads it off disk, then decodes it. Using a digital terrestrial card, the captured audio/video is already an mpeg stream so less processor power is needed - the encode stage is skipped, captured data is written to disk without processing. My experimental system (600MHz Pentium III) can only handle using a frame grabber card if I set the capture resolution to something like 240x240 and quality to "lousy"; once I have a working digital terrestrial card I can increase the resolution and quality somewhat.
Anyway, left to right, we have:
- MythTV programme guide.
- Off-air television.
- DVD playback.
Regards, Kat.