xv overlay - cinema mode

[Alex Deucher]

On 3/22/07, Wesley S. <profox at ubuntu-nl.org> wrote:
> 2007/3/22, Xavier Bestel <xavier.bestel at free.fr>:
> > I think you can do what you're looking for with Mandriva's new
> > compositing window manager: as it enables you to clone windows, you
> > could clone your video-out window, and on the one of the screens zoom
> > until the video is fullscreen, and voilà !
> >
>
> Thanks, Xavier, but I was already aware of Metisse. But you can hardly
> call it new, the first public release of Metisse was in June 2004 ;)
> http://insitu.lri.fr/metisse/old-news.html
>
> To be honest, I also thought of doing something like this, since
> modern compositing (window) managers can just clone windows etc. but I
> don't really think that that is the best solution either. It is
> creative though :)
>
> 2007/3/22, Alex Deucher <alexdeucher at gmail.com>:
> > It's just non-xinerama dualhead.  Source the overlay to crtc2 and it
> > will take care of the scaling and such.  You could implement the
> > necessary code in your favorite movie player.
>
> I don't know a lot at the technical level of video and/or X.org, but
> it does sound interesting.
>
> Would this "trick" play my video in the movie player on my first
> screen and fullscreened/scaled on the second screen (TV)? Or is that
> not the case?
>
> And what is this "crtc2" thing? Google tells me "cathode ray tube
> controller" but that sounds like it would only work with CRT
> screens... or doesn't that matter, because a crt controller is
> something that's not necessarily related to crt screens?
>
> Thanks for your answers, Xavier and Alex
>

CRTCs are the part of the video chip that controls the timing and part
of the frambuffer that gets sent to an output.  If you have two crtcs
you can have two independent outputs.  The CRT part is just a legacy
part of the name in that in the "old" days monitors were always CRTs.
you can call the display controllers if you'd prefer.  You could have
your video app feed video to a window on crtc1 and also to an window
on crtc2.  Since hardware usually only has one overlay, you could only
do HW scaling and colorspace conversion on one output.  So:
1. set up dualhead (with or without xinerama)
2. hack you video app to output to two buffers (one on :0.0 and one on
:0.1 if no xinerama)

Alex