As you may have noticed, I wasn’t having much luck installing Mythtv on my Ubuntu linux installation. While I work on those problems, I ran across the idea of writing video files directly to the TV-out on the Happauge WinTV-PVR-350 card that I just bought. I’ve never had great quality coming from the TV-out on my ATI Radeon 9600 Pro video card, so I thought I’d give it a shot.
First step was getting IVTV set up again. My Ubuntu upgrade wiped out all my modules, of course 
Next, I got IVTV configured using this great guide I found (just read this one page). It gets you to a point where you have a working /dev/video16 device which corresponds to the video-out on the PVR-350.
Now comes the fun part, playing your first video. If you’re playing any type of MPEG file, it’s as easy as one command:
dd if=YOURFILE.mpg of=/dev/video16 bs=64k
Check out your CPU load when you’re doing this. It’s so low it doesn’t even register. Piping data is fun 
“But, hey my sexy fellow, how do I play my AVIs if you can only pipe MPEGs to the video device?” For that, you can use your good friend (who always passes out at your place with a lampshade on his head. “YAH, I’M TALKING ABOUT YOU!” ) FFMPEG. FFMPEG can pipe its encoding output directly to the video-out device:
ffmpeg -target ntsc-dvd /dev/video16 -i YOURVIDEO.avi
In this example, FFMPEG is piping a DVD MPEG2 directly to the device. If your CPU can’t handle that much encoding, you can always bump the -target down to “ntsc-svcd” or even “ntsc-vcd” (if you’re really desperate).
Now obviously, this isn’t ideal. FFMPEG takes some serious CPU to encode MPEG2 on-the-fly, and forget about things like pause or letterboxing. But you’ll be amazed how excellent and smooth those videos look when written directly to the device 
I know what you’re all thinking: why doesn’t he just use a framebuffer and MPlayer to play those videos, complete with pause and no need for encoding? Well, if you can get the fbdev framebuffer working in MPlayer, pleeeeeeeease tell me how Here’s a hint, the syntax is something like:
mplayer -vo fbdev:/dev/fb1 YOURFILE.AVI
I just get errors
Wow this post was stupid, rambling, and not too useful. Oh well, so are most of my friends!