[O] T E L E T U X
D I G I T A L . V I D E O . S Y S T E M

[PROJECT PAGE/DOWNLOAD] [SYNCFB] [LIBTELETUX]

N E W S

2001-03-06 Syncfb Version 0.3 for xine 0.4.0: Download Syncfb 0.3 here.
2001-01-24 New Release of Syncfb: Download Syncfb 0.2 here.

W H A T . I S . I T ?

Teletux is the challenge to bring the best possible video quality to high resolution display devices. That is your computer monitor of course, but more importantly video projectors, plasma displays and hdtv tvs.

W H Y ?

Short answer: You should really watch your DVDs on the big screen.
Long answer: Computer Monitors, projectors, etc have not only higher resolutions than your tv set, they are also technically different. A television set uses an 'interlaced' display mode, lcd projectors are always displaying in progressive mode. That makes a big difference. While progressive displays are generally considered a Good Thing (tm), watching interlaced source material on such a display often is not Very Funny (tm) because of very ugly conversion artifacts. The goal of this project is to bring back the fun.

G O T . A . P R O B L E M ?

Lets assume that we have a digital video source that provides us with a stream of images (lets call it V4L).
Problem #1: The frequency of the image stream is different than the monitor frequency. We need to synchronize it to avoid 'tearing' artifacts.
Problem #2: We need to scale the image to our display's resolution.
Problem #3: The video source is probably interlaced, but not always, and if not, there are still at least two ways in which the progressive content is coded (see: How Film Is Transferred to Video). This is actually the bigest problem. We need to either de-interlace the picture or extract the progressive picture.
Problem #4:Cinema still looks better. We won't solve that, but there are several other ways to improve image quality through color upsampling, de-noising, etc. But that is future talk.

T H E . S O L U T I O N ?

There is not one single solution. You can of course buy very, very expensive equipment that solves all these problems, but a) you don't have the money and b) it's no fun.
Another solution is to use your linux box and try to spend every CPU cycle for image processing. That is what this project is all about. The first result is syncfb, a driver for the Matrox G200/G400 cards that operates as a FIFO buffer to synchronize an image stream with the display frequency, that scales the image using the graphics hardware and even implements a simple de-interlacing algorithm.
The next step will be "libTeletux", a generic video processing library, that uses syncfb as it's output device.

W H O ?

me.