[mythtv-users] 2 quick Q's - best PVR-350 price and does MythGame work with TV out on PVR-350?

[Michael T. Dean]

Dave Bush wrote:

>    Also - I've really debated on whether I go with the 350 or not 
> until I read someone saying that DVD out works fine for him. This may 
> come as a dumb question, but does the TV out on the 350 also work with 
> MythGame? I like the idea of being able to play my favorite xMAME 
> games on the TV instead of my computer, and I think this would be 
> cool. I've Googled around looking for an answer to this but haven't 
> seen anything one way or another.

IMHO, you're much better off going with a PVR-250 or PVR-250MCE ($80 - 
$125) and a GF4MX440 (or similar) video card ($20 - $40) if you want to 
do OpenGL (including MythMusic visualizations and games).  There's no 
hardware acceleration, so it's not just something missing from the 
current drivers.

Also, DVD's and any other video not recorded with the PVR-350 (i.e. 
MOV's, AVI's, DivX, XviD, etc.) will show occasional tearing with a 
PVR-350 because the OSD (on-screen display) framebuffer was not designed 
to work as a graphics card--it was designed as a framebuffer for holding 
the OSD to be composited on top of the video underlay.  Although it's 
theoretically possible to play a DVD (MPEG-2 data) through the hardware 
decoder/TV out of the PVR-350, you won't want to because it doesn't work 
with all DVD's, causes pretty significant A/V synchronization issues, 
and prevents you from doing any post-processing of the image.  Instead, 
you'll have to play the DVD's on the OSD framebuffer.

The only thing that almost made me decide to keep using the PVR-350's TV 
out was it's picture quality.  However, the picture is only marginally 
better than that on my Chaintech GF4MX440-8x (and I haven't done any 
work on optimizing it with filters) and the GF4 provides a lot of other 
benefits (OpenGL and X Video support, and I won't even mention the 
stability issues).  I no longer load the PVR-350's framebuffer module 
and just use the GF4.  Even though I spent $170 on my PVR-350, the extra 
$40 I spent on the GF4 (about 4 months after getting the PVR-350) is 
what made the system.

Just make sure you don't get a Roslyn/Blackbird design for the PVR-250 ( 
http://ivtv.writeme.ch/tiki-index.php?page=SupportedHardware ).  It 
won't work.

Mike