Mplayer rc1

Mplayer entered in rc state. It must have been more than 2-3 years it was on a pre-release state.
I guess 1.0pre8 must have been the last pre-release version.
8 pre-releases is not that much... Links 2.1 is in pre-release 23 :)

slackware-current and TV-Card

Ok, After having for years a TV Card hooked on one of my motherboard's PCI slots and never using it I decided to configure it and make it usable. My card is an old PixelView PV_BT878P+ (REV .9F) card with a TPI8PSB02D tuner on it, or at least that what it is printed on the tuner :).

It wasn't hard at all. I just open /usr/src/linux-2.6.16.18/Documentation/video4linux/CARDLIST.bttv and the most relative card values for my case were:
16 -> Prolink Pixelview PlayTV (bt878)
37 -> Prolink PixelView PlayTV pro
50 -> Prolink PV-BT878P+4E / PixelView PlayTV PAK / Lenco MXTV-9578 CP
70 -> Prolink Pixelview PV-BT878P+ (Rev.4C,8E)

For the tuner I opened /usr/src/linux-2.6.16.18/Documentation/video4linux/CARDLIST.tuner and since I couldn't find the exact model I tried those values:
tuner=28 - LG PAL_BG+FM (TPI8PSB01D)
tuner=29 - LG PAL_BG (TPI8PSB11D)

To make the modules load correct through hotplug I just created a new file in /etc/modprobe.d/, I named it v4l with those options in it:

# i2c
alias char-major-89 i2c-dev
options i2c-algo-bit bit_test=1

# bttv
alias char-major-81 videodev
alias char-major-81-0 bttv
options bttv card=70 radio=1 tuner=28

card=70 and tuner=28 gave me the best result I think. The signal is a lot weaker than the one I have on my TV and if I remember correct it's also weaker than the one I had in windows years ago, but at least the card works. I use tvtime as a TV application.

What exactly is the problem? the card, the modules, tvtime, me?

strange problem with Greek subtitles in mplayer

Ok, a few days ago, I compiled mplayer again, using the source from the CVS this time. Everything seems to be fine, until I discovered a really strange problem when displaying greek subtitles in avi movies.
The Greek were sort of inverted horizontaly.
Instead of displaying:
"Τι κάνεις" it looked more like "ςιενάκ ιτ".
English were displayed fine, so "Τι κάνεις John" looked like "ςιενάκ ιτ John".

I tried using a windows arial.ttf font with the same results. What I had to do is keep the font encoding to Modern Greek (ISO-8859-7) but change the Subtitle encoding in Subtitle & OSD tab to Western European Languages with Euro (ISO-8859-15). I don't know why but after doing this it worked.

My First Message

I just created my first blog...