standard definition crt television?

[cactusfriend]

so...i've inherited a rather large old-school crt television with an s-video input.

the video card on my intended boxee computer has s-video out. it's a linux machine with an ati radeon 9600xt. does anyone here have any experience with running boxee on a standard definition tv? will it look at all usable, or even work at all?

thanks!

[agentlame]

i run it on an older 32" crt in my bedroom... works fine, other than some hulu goofiness:
http://forum.boxee.tv/showpost.php?p=10278&postcount=18

[jett]

i run it on an older 32" crt in my bedroom... works fine, other than some hulu goofiness:
http://forum.boxee.tv/showpost.php?p=10278&postcount=18

What resolution are you running at? I find the fonts are kind of difficult to read on my 32" CRT (flat screen).

[agentlame]

1024x768... don't get me wrong, boxee isn't 100% legible... but, i've never had a media center app that was, on that tv.

but in regards to how it works/scales/looks... it's no worse than any other media center.

[jett]

1024x768... don't get me wrong, boxee isn't 100% legible... but, i've never had a media center app that was, on that tv.

but in regards to how it works/scales/looks... it's no worse than any other media center.

Ya, I just happened to come from MythTV which actually looked pretty decent on my TV - the fonts were a good size to be legible.

Oh well, better case for me to convince my fiancee we need a new tv

Dave

[jonnojohnson]

I have the default 1024x768 resolution on my SD 29" CRT via composite video cable and the fonts are pretty small. Is there a way to increase the minimum font size that Boxee uses? I've tried lower resolutions but it doesn't help.
Also, since I installed Boxee I get a thin horizontal line of static near the bottom of my tv screen. Calibrating the video doesn't help. Does anyone have any tips?

[jpabell]

There is a fonts.xml file in the boxee directory with some values listed and you could just increase the number. Although you have to guess and check to find out what you just changed.

[jonnojohnson]

Can someone confirm that this is the right way to do it? I looked in the font.xml file in the 720p directory and it only contains fonts down to size 14. I searched for "font" within the files in the rest of the 720p directory and there are references to font12 so there must be something else going on. Just want to be sure before I start messing with stuff.

[inuse]

Yeah, the font sizes throughout the interface when seen on a 32" CRT are too small from more than about 5' away. Something like the "Use bigger fonts" option from the Mediastream skin in XBMC would be nice.

[chasep2001]

Here is a simple perl script that will increase all of the fonts by a X units.

#!/usr/bin/perl

#parse the command line
if($#ARGV > -1){
 $factor = $ARGV[0];
} else {
 $factor = 2;
}

#open the file
open FILE, "Font.xml";

while(<FILE>){
 if($_ =~ /(.*?)<size>(\d+)<\/size>/i){
   print $1,"<size>",($2+$factor),"</size>\n";
 } else {
   print $_;
 }
}

save that in your skin/Boxee Skin NG/720p folder.
It will output the new file to stdout.
Here is how I used it (I called the file growfonts.pl):

skin/Boxee Skin NG/720p# perl growfonts.pl > Font2.xml
skin/Boxee Skin NG/720p# mv Font.xml Font.xml.bak
skin/Boxee Skin NG/720p# mv Font2.xml Font.xml

Of course, you can just output it directly to Font.xml if you don't care about overwriting it (or have already backed it up)

If you want to increase the fonts by more something different than 2, just specify it on the command line:

skin/Boxee Skin NG/720p# perl growfonts.pl 4 > Font2.xml

If you specify a negative number, it will decrease the font size.

While I have used this on my machine for both versions 0.9.9.5324 and 0.9.10.5534 without any issue, I take no responsibilty if you screw up your Boxee installation, server, house, job, marriage, or life in general by using this script.