[mythtv-users] better tv-out cards

[Ray Olszewski]

At 02:22 AM 5/8/2003 -0400, Craig Longman wrote:

>i'm getting frustrated with the squished up output i'm getting on this 
>nvidia card i bought for tv out.
[...]
>i know we've had discussions about output cards before, but i'm curious 
>about overscanning in specific here, i want to be able to stretch the 
>picture out wider, but not have to make it taller.

I've been looking into TV out for awhile now, and it appears to me that 
alternatives to nVidia are tough to find. The problem is not fiddling with 
overscan, but the more basic one of getting the card to work reasonably at 
all using TV out. This is a summary based on my own experience plus 
comments I've seen here on the list:

         ATI - There is no official support for TV out by ATI or in the 
standard X drivers. While many people refer to the experimental support in 
an abandoned branch of the GATOS CVS drivers, I have never seen a report 
posted  anywhere by someone saying "I got this to work".

         Matrox - There is good support for TV out itself for recent Matrox 
cards. I've tried it and it looks nice. The huge hole here is that the 
Matrox TV-out capability does NOT support xVideo. (Currently, I use a 
Matrox card in my Myth host, and it works fine for playback, but it is too 
slow to support simultaneous record and playback, including watching "live" 
TV.)

         Savage - I have seen reports that the standard saveg X driver 
works with TV out using Savage IX cards. I haven't tried this myself. I 
have been unable to get TV out working with a Savage 2000 ... but I haven't 
tried very hard, since this Savage card too does not support xVideo.

         nVidia - many work, with nVidia's driver. I've seen some reports 
that some cards work with the standard X driver and nvtv, but I have not 
seen enough detail to know if this is correct. Of course, you already have 
an nVidia card.

If there are ANY other card maker with TV-out AGP cards, I don't know about 
them. There are, as this list discusses from time to time, external 
VGA-to-NTSC (or -to-PAL) converters.

In trying to figure out this TV out stuff, the biggest source of confusion 
to me has been postings from laptop users. There is a lot of information 
about using TV out with various chipsets that, when you track it down, is 
based on tests with laptops. As far as I can tell, *none* of this 
information carries over to AGP cards with the same chipsets ... I assume 
the difference is that the AGP cards deliberately make TV-out with 
unofficial drivers hard as an accommodation to pressure from the media 
companies.

Now all of this is my **best guess** about the situation. I don't offer it 
as gospel, and I'd welcome corrections. I would encourage others, though, 
to identify a card as working only if they themselves have made it work 
(and, ideally, can explain how), because there seems to be too much 
misinterpreted second-hand info floating around on this topic.