Improve Tv-out Interface?


OmarNawaz

Active Member
Joined
May 15, 2004
Messages
663
Hiya

was wondering if there is a way to imrpove the look of the gp2x when on tv out like use higher resolution theme graphics or soemthing?

Thanks
 
"higher resolution theme graphics"

... I'll get right on it ...
 
I think he means 'can the interface look better when using TV-out'... fact is, the TV is using the 240-lines-tall resolution the GP2X uses on its LCD, it's just an NTSC or PAL signal now. You could probably put 640x480 video onto it, but I don't see much point. Most programs are tuned for 320x240 since this is the GP2X native resolution, or they are emulators where the original system ran at that resolution-- no emulated system supports such high resolutions that runs at acceptable speed on the GP2X anyway. And cranking up the resolution of the menu alone would be rather pointless and needlessly complex, entailing some peculiar resolution switches when the program launched and ended.

In short, it's perhaps possible, but not a logical idea.
 
OmarNawaz posted on May 30 2006 at 04:38 PM said:
Hiya

was wondering if there is a way to imrpove the look of the gp2x when on tv

Thanks

Yes, I improved the look of my GP2X while on the TV with the use of a simple doily, or throw. It can be crocheted, but who has the time? I buy the fake plastic ones, cheaper still is the option of patterned napkins that appear crocheted. No-one will notice your GP2X anyway, all they care about is what is on the screen ;) :p.

:lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: I am in a precocious mood :) ;) :p.
 
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Loubear posted on May 30 2006 at 08:31 PM said:
Huh? Doesn't the gp2x resize the movies to their original sizes in tv-out mode?

Yes, but apparantly that takes more processing power ... or something.
 
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TelcoLou posted on May 30 2006 at 05:33 PM said:
Loubear posted on May 30 2006 at 08:31 PM said:
Huh? Doesn't the gp2x resize the movies to their original sizes in tv-out mode?

Yes, but apparantly that takes more processing power ... or something.

Not more processing power, more bandwidth, we don't have HDTV res, we can handle anything up to normal TV/DVD res just fine.

Epicenter posted on May 30 2006 at 05:51 PM said:
The built-in scaling hardware has to do it. And that scaler seems to use more power than the ARM920T, ARM940T, screen and backlight combined.

Whoa there big fella, what exactly are you talking about? There is a frame processor, and scaler, and another scaler in the seperate TV-Out chip.

I don't know the power on that "frame processor" but it is one of the embedded cores and shouldn't need all that much juice, besides the ARM cores throttle back when viewing video because that core is doing the grunt work. If you are using the TV-Out then you are going to power-up the TV-Out seperate chip and I am not sure it is designed to be that low-power, also I think it has an Auto-scaler too, but it wouldn't need using if you are watching TV size content would it :).
 
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mm, I sort of doubt that. You see, an ARM920T core uses only 0.25mW of power per MHz with cache utilized. That's 50mW at 200 MHz-- or 50 THOUSANDTHS of 1 watt! This is extremely little power, and the 940T's power utilization is about the same; probably a bit lower due to lack of an MMU and less cache to power. We can both agree this is not a heavy load on the batteries on its own. When any sort of scaling operation takes place-- viewing a 720x480 video rather than a 320x240 one, using TV output, et cetera-- battery life PLUMMETS. Craigix has equated this to the TV lead using more power-- clearly what's really happening, as the raw current draw of an NTSC or PAL video signal is negligable and insignificant to battery life, is the scaling hardware is drawing an enormous amount of power. This is logical. The MMSP2 seems originally planned for home-theater media playback on a DVD-player like device-- with main support for MPEG4, much like a Philips DVD Player I own which reads MPEG4 content incl. DivX and XViD. There would be no battery power issues to encounter there.
 
TelcoLou posted on May 30 2006 at 07:33 PM said:
:lol: Fight! Fight!
I love the mods here :)

I see your points Epicenter, I was merely asking if you had concrete proof of what was going on from personal experience.

I agree to the point of increased consumption from additional hardware, including scalers.

I wonder what the frame processor is doing about scaling, it is possible that the frame processor could scale it as part of the decoding process, unlikely though.

As I mentioned earlier, there is an MMSP2 scaler, and a CX TV chip scaler, which, or both, do you think is causing the draw? Do you believe the frame ("video") processor is causing a large part of the power drain.

I suppose all one would need to do is disable various options, such as output, and see what the power drain is on raw de-compressing of video, then see what the 2 scalers are drawing for power. If one of them is on needlessly we simply need better written software, it is coming along nicely as is.

On topic, we simply need a menu replacement that is scalable, it can be 640x480 full time and scaled while on the LCD, then on the TV it will be fine, 20-Odd pictures should be nothing to our scaler/raw ARM power, it can even Cache the scaled versions if necessary.

The menu is open source? Either way the skin packs we have are brilliant compared to the firmware supplied with most DVD players out there. I don't know if more resolution is absolutely necessary, but if it is simply use a menu replacer that has configurable buttons, move them to a 640x480 grid and modify the source to do a call for a 640x480 frame buffer. It will only be 4x the data of the menu now, I don't think it would impact the function or speed too much, it might even look much better:).
 
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Everbody will think that I'm a stupid noob, but I was thinking that the emus (NeoGeo, MD...) should provide a scanline option for the Tv-Out. So the screen will be more like on the GP2x screen (not beautifull but no more "big pixel").
 
Mortys posted on May 31 2006 at 06:11 AM said:
Everbody will think that I'm a stupid noob, but I was thinking that the emus (NeoGeo, MD...) should provide a scanline option for the Tv-Out. So the screen will be more like on the GP2x screen (not beautifull but no more "big pixel").

Even if that is possible (you can only output 320x240 resolution if I recall correctly), it would make the emulator slower...
 
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OmarNawaz - are you referring to the start-up icon graphics that the gp2x uses (video, games, utilities etc) rather than the quality of tv-out for emulators etc?
 
ste_167 posted on May 31 2006 at 03:21 PM said:
OmarNawaz - are you referring to the start-up icon graphics that the gp2x uses (video, games, utilities etc) rather than the quality of tv-out for emulators etc?

Yeah thats exactly what I mean the graphics of the interface
 
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Epicenter posted on May 31 2006 at 01:51 AM said:
The built-in scaling hardware has to do it. And that scaler seems to use more power than the ARM920T, ARM940T, screen and backlight combined.
The hardware YUV scaler might take a bit of power since it actually processes the video data, but I doubt it takes much.
The RGB scaler - which is used to scale the display bitmap (whether to the LCD or TV) takes negligible power - it's only a very basic fixed-point fractional scaler. In terms of implementing in silicon it's practically the same as without scaling.
What's been said before is that it's the TV-out chip that's drawing the power.
 
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I don't doubt you could just implicitly set a higher resolution to run the program with and output this larger frame to the TV. But it would not display on the GP2X LCD without scaling, and that will put a drain on batteries since the whole display would need to be scaled down in realtime to 320x240 for LCD use. Switching back and forth between video modes and only using one display at a time would be the least battery-costly approach, I gather.
 
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