The Kbtv menus
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The Kbtv menus


Kbtv's menus and their items

The Channel menu contains actions to tune up and down your playlist (cyclic), corresponding with the up and down buttons in the toolbar. Shortcut keys are the PgUp and PgDown keys, for your fast zapping enjoyment. The channel input box in the toolbar can also be used if you like to enter the channel number manually (hit enter afterwards). This menu also contains the Quit action, with the usual shortcut key combination of Ctrl+Q.

The Tools menu is for special dialogs you sometimes need but not often. You can launch the Channel editor dialog from it to manage your channel list, and the Hardware info dialog which is only informational. Shortcut keys are F10 and F11. If using the pwc driver, there's no Channel editor entry (it's greyed out).

The Settings menu is for things you may want to adjust more often. It contains a toggle to and from full-screen mode (or just hit F9). In full-screen mode only the toolbar is shown (it's sufficiently small to not make the slight aspect distortion noticable). The full-screen toggle is also the first item of the toolbar.

Next you can invoke the Picture settings dialog from this menu. It allows you to set brightness, contrast, color balance, and color saturation. The shortcut key is F12.

To change the viewer size you can use the size submenu under Settings. Shortcut keys are F6, F7, F8 respectively for small size (200x150), medium size (400x300) and large size (the actual frame size when using a TV card, 640x480 or 768x576; SDTV 720x576 gets scaled up to 4:3 aspect). If using Brooktree, the actual capture size is changed if you change the size, with saa/pwc this is not the case.

For pwc, the capture size is currently fixed at 320x240, and this may not work out too great for some cameras. This should be improved later (e.g. capture size choice integrated into or as switch for its viewer). Below is a snapshot taken with a Logitech cam (one of those "balls" that can tilt and pan).

The Driver menu item provides a means to switch between bktr, pwc, and saa drivers, and their respective backend players. This is only available if Kbtv has saa and/or pwc support. Shortcut key combinations are Alt+b, Alt+s and Alt+p respectively.

If you switch to pwc from bktr or saa, the Channel menu entries for Up and Down change into Up/Down and Left/Right and their actions are to pan and tilt the camera (if your hardware supports it). They also appear in the toolbar. The volume slider and channel input disappear (they don't make sense with a webcam). See the Mainwindow screenshot below.

Finally, you can turn the volume up or down by 10 percent points using the Volume menu item. You'll probably rather use the slider in the toolbar, or the shortcut keys, - and +. Volume setting is disabled with webcam.

You are probably already familiar with the Help menu, since you likely used it to launch the KDE Help Center with this handbook. There's not much to say about it, other than that the What's this functionalty is not implemented.


Kbtv main window screenshot with webcam

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