GB-PVR, X-Card, 256 colours, workaround.. problem!

[joshley]

I've been working on a nasty workaround for GB-PVR to enable X-Card users to have nice full colour graphics for the menu. It works along the lines of this:

1) X-Card out to Scart switcher box on priority B
2) Graphics card TV-Out to scart switcher box on priority A
3) When in menu system enable TV-Out and when not (i.e. go to watch a DVD for TV) disable it so the X-Card gets priority back

Problem... it all works (it's only an ULTRA simple program, it disables TV-Out by calling a shortcut key set up to do so via the graphics card setup (mind you, getting a shortcut-key to be recognised SYSTEM wide i.e. not just in any one Window was a lot harder than just using SendKeys!), but only if you have two monitors plugged in! The graphics card (well, mine anyway) doesn't let you disable the only remaining device. Does anyone know of a way to trick Windows into thinking it has another monitor plugged in?

Alternatively someone can infiltrate TVedia and find out how on earth they got millions of colours out of the X-Card!

Gits.

Thanks in advance people!

Josh

[sub]

Quote[/b] ]Alternatively someone can infiltrate TVedia and find out how on earth they got millions of colours out of the X-Card!

TVedia is only showing 256 colors.

TVedia (Joveplayer) spent nearly two years as software targetting only the XCard. Thats a lot of time to focus on making things as nice as possible for one piece of target hardware. They did a good job at this.

The have also come up with a good dithering algorithm for converting their OSD images into 256 colours (which BTW they're trying to patent). In GB-PVR I use a pretty primitive algorithm. Its fast, but not as good as the TVedia scheme. It doesn't help that my default skin uses heaps of colours, so is never going to translate well into 256 colours. In the past I had an experimental version that did a really good conversion, with optomized palette for each screen, but it was way slow and this wasn't an area I want to spend my very limited available time.

They are able to show photos with millions of colours. To do this they made a photos module that will make a mpg movie out of a photo, meaning they could show a photo in full colour (on a black background) just like a movie has full colour.

[Guest]

Why not use a dvd menu overlay that links to you regular menu. If you could find an easy way to dynamically change it when you add menu items.

[sub]

The short answer is no, you cant do that.