[Kwintv] Snapshots (no, not those kind...)

[Michael Reiher]

On Thursday 11 March 2004 17:36, George Staikos wrote:
>   Perhaps with XRANDR it will be better, but the old vidmode extension was
> just plain aweful.  
I fully agree that the old(kwintv) implementation is plain awful. But OTOH it 
does it's job just fine. Actually even quite good. Basically I don't care how 
vidmode switching is done. But as others mentiond switching with XRANDR f*cks 
up all window geometries. Seems like a kwin bug or missing feature to me. So, 
using XRANDR qtvision would rely on a window manager "supporting" it. Also 
XFrees older than 4.3(?) don't support XRANDR at all, AFAIK. I for one had a 
SuSE 7.3, without XRANDR,  running until just recently, as it did it's job 
and I was just too lazy to update.

> I don't buy that it was much better than just viewing a 
> smaller window, or using software or Xv scaling.  Anyway, the point remains
Hmm, I don't get the thing with the smaller window. Of course a full 
resolution tv window is much better? Maybe we are talking about different 
things. Software scaling needs too much CPU to be useful, especially on older 
hardware. And XV is not always available.

And regarding quality, I just compared fullscreen overlay again with qtvisions 
fullscreen XV. I admit that it's not _much_ worse than fullscreen overlay, 
contrary to what I hab in memory from previous tries. But it still "feels" 
worse. What I can say is that noise in the image is much more visible. Those 
two might be acceptable. But the jerky image, which is definitly there, is 
not really, for me at least.

> that QtVision is a far better application right now, and while some people
> may need overlay, it is coming along nicely and is not by any means a
> showstopper given that we have two other well functioning video modes.
>
Btw: whats the difference between the two, don't both use XVideo? Or the other 
way: what is the XVideo plugin capable of, what the bttv one can't do?

Anyway, of course I know that I'm really in no position to tell you what you 
should do or not. And I'd never try to stop anyone from doing a release, of 
couse:) I just wrote what I observe, and what IMHO should be kept in 
mind(e.g. older hardware or no XV or XRANDR). And actually all I'm trying to 
say is that it might be better to name the release 0.8 or something. As it is 
not as complete and perfect(in term of image quality), as a 1.0 should IMHO 
be. Otherwise I think users in general and of current kwintv in particular 
might be disappointed. No matter, the better code and interal structure of 
qtvision. They want to enjoy watching TV most of all, so portability(in terms 
of XV,XRANDR or not) and image quality is very important.

Greets

Michael