BeTV Documentation

Welcome to BeTV! The BeTV application allows you to view video and capture single frames. It has tuner support, audio support, and you can also view video output from video cameras, VCR, laserdiscs, etc. This software requires the WinCast TV card from Hauppauge. I believe the model I have is #401.

Installation

The BeTV.tar.gz archive contains this documentation, the BeTV application, and the latest Bt848 driver that I have access to and a gzipped archive of some Be clip files (more about them later). This version of BeTV REQUIRES the Datatypes 1.4.1c library available at ftp.be.com so get and install that first. To use BeTV you must install the Wincast TV card, then put Bt848 in /boot/system/drivers. You can put BeTV anywhere (like /boot/apps or /boot/local/apps). The documentation can be anywhere. BeTV will create a preference file called "BeTV Preferences" and a "BeTV Channels" file in /boot/system/settings when launched for the first time. If BeTV is unable to run (due to lack of Wincast TV card and/or the Bt848 driver, it should quit with an appropriate error message. If you have been using an earlier version of BeTV, be aware that the preferences file has changed slightly. BeTV should replace it with an updated version of the preferences file, but this will result in changes to your default configuration.

Interface

BeTV's interface is very simple. There is a power button, four sliders to adjust hue, saturation, brightness and contrast and four text fields to enter and/or view these settings numerically. The sliders are navigable and accept left and right arrow keypresses. The video view area at the top of window can be resized manually or via the preferences described later. There is an LED readout for channels and arrows for setting the channel. You can now edit the channel directly by touching it and using the keyboard to enter new numbers. There is now also a BeTV Remote window for quick changes to such parameters as video and audio source. There is currently considerable overlap between the preferences window (described below) the remote window. This will change eventually. Bear in mind that changes made to the preferences window only take effect after the window is closed. The remote window is for making immediate changes.

Preferences

BeTV allows you to make the following changes in a preference window.

Hitting "OK" accepts the preference changes for the current session. Hitting "Save" saves the preference changes to disk and "Cancel", uh, cancels changes.

Video Modes

Physical memory access is DMA or Direct Memory Access. It passes video data from the Wincast TV card directly to the graphics card over the PCI bus. Logical memory access or Bitmap mode draws into a buffer and spits out successive bitmaps to the window. DMA, or PHYSICAL, mode is faster and allows smooth video in large windows if your graphics card is fast enough to keep up. My S3 card tops out at about 400x300, but I hear that Twin Turbo cards do much better. DMA only works effectively in 32 bit screens. Eight bit screens make you feel like the alien in "Predator". This is because the Wincast TV card in 8 bit mode is hard-coded to a Win95 palette which is different from the BeOS system palette. You can see the 8 bit color when you are in full screen mode described below. Bitmap, also called LOGICAL, mode is slower and CPU intensive, but works in 8 bit mode. It also doesn't suffer from DMA mode's screen artifacts when the window is resized or moved about the screen rapidly. Adjusting video characteristics like brightness is instantaneous in DMA mode whereas in Bitmap mode it takes effect once the slider is released or a number is entered.

Full Screen Mode

It is now possible to watch your computer monitor like a TV! Unfortunately, due to an apparent bug in BWindowScreen, Only 8 bit full screen mode is properly supported. If you are in a 32 bit workspace, you will get junk on the screen. I'm sure this is fixed in DR9. You can switch to full screen by hitting Alt-F or choosing "Full Screen" from the application menu. You exit this mode by hitting the , escape, key, changing workspaces or quitting BeTV (Alt-Q). In full screen mode, BeTV uses the 8 bit color palette that the WinCast TV card expects to see, so the color dithering looks good. Though 32 bit is much better, you may not have a graphics card that can handle the large volume of data that a 640x480 sized screen expects. Although full screen mode doesn't adequately support 32 bit screens you can create a similar affect in a 640x480 32bit workspace by enlarging the BeTV console window to fill the screen. You do this by dragging the BeTV console window until the top left corner is precisely aligned with the top lef corner of the viewable area of your monitor, then use Alt-P to open the preferences window and set the default window size to 640x480. Then close the preference window and type Alt-O to turn on BeTV.

Frame Grab Modes

Drag & drop means just that. You can click in the view area and drag an image to a folder in the Browser or a window in BePaint. You can do this at anytime in Bitmap mode, but must stop the video (with the power switch) before doing it in DMA mode (Bitmap mode doesn't have this restriction). Clipboard mode copies the image to the be_clipboard whenever you hit the powerswitch. You can then paste it into any app that accepts bitmap data (like BePaint :-)). Print Screen mode actually does nothing. I included it for situations where the other modes don't work properly for some reason. Choosing Print Screen mode allows you to use F13 to capture the entire screen without intereference. You can then use a graphics app (like BePaint) to crop/edit your screen dump.

BeTV Remote

This is a new addition to BeTV. The remote window allows you to make more and quicker adjustments to BeTV. At the top of the window are the most common buttons for switching channels and running BeTV. There is also a popup menu called "Choices" for accessing more controls of BeTV. The "Control Box" has the same brightness, contrast, hue and saturation sliders as BeTV. In addition there are volume control sliders. These control the Master volume on the BeBox. I haven't tested these on a PowerMac, so I'm not sure how well they do there. There is also a Mute checkbox. The "Tool Box" area contains buttons for manipulating channel information. The "Scan Channel" button goes through every channel sequentially in your locale, 1-125 for cable, 2-69 for the airwaves, and deactivates bad or weak stations in the Channels file. You cannot currently interrupt this process. It will continue until it is done. Once this is done the arrow buttons will jump over weak or nonexistant stations in your area. You can always got to any channel directly whether it is active or not, but entering its number in the channel indicator next to the arrow buttons.You can also manually add or remove channels from the list by checking or unchecking the "Active Channel" checkbox. This only affects the channel you are currently viewing. The "Chan Return" button toggles between the current channel and the last channel you viewed. For the truly challenged channel surfer among you, the "Search Channels" button advances through each channel, pausing for approximately 1 second. In the future this interval will be editable. You can stop the channel search in a number of ways, but the easiest is to probably hit the "Channel down" button. The "Engage Timer" and Timer items are currently unused placeholders. The "Video Box" area contains popup menus that are also accessible through the preference window. However, here choices are acted upon immediately by BeTV. The "Clip Map" is for selecting internal images for clipping, but is currently unimplemented, but the "Clip" checkbox works. The "Channel Box" is a place holder for more comprehensive channel manipulation scheme which will come later.

Clipping

When "Clip" is checked in the remote or preference windows, BeTV can use graphic images to clip or knock out an area on the view screen. There are two internal images for clipping. The "BeTV" logo you see when you start BeTV is the default image used for clipping. You can also introduce other images for clipping by Drag&Dropping them from the Browser or BePaint. The affect on BeTV is that wherever the image is black (item 0 in the 8 bit colorlist or rgb_color = {0 0 0 ?}) live video will show through. On all other colors you will either see the original image shining through or the outline of the image with the previous frame pasted on top. This BeTV archive comes with file called clippers.tar.gz. This is an archive of simple image you can drop on BeTV. Feel free to make your own. Send comments/criticisms to:
hndrcksn@museum.cl.msu.edu