[mythtv-users] S-Video Out: Nvidia GF4 of FX5200

Shawn Asmussen shawn.asmussen at gmail.com
Thu Dec 23 17:32:04 UTC 2004


On Wed, 22 Dec 2004 23:30:38 -0800, Brad Templeton
<brad+myth at templetons.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 22, 2004 at 04:40:47PM -0700, mark wrote:
> > I have had good luck with the 5200
> > Great quality and fairly cheap.
> 
> 
> The 5200 is the low end of the FX line, and reasonably powerful,
> but if you just want xvideo out of the card, and little else,
> why even go there.   Plain tv-out cards in the geforce 4 line can
> be had for $30, and even less in other chipsets.
> 
> For HDTV, betware that some drivers can't do xvideo at 1900 wide,
> such as the open source nvidia drivers.  but for tv-out they are
> probably all fine.  if xvmc becomes workable, the mx400 line also has
> that pretty much the same as the 5200.
> 

Well, if you want to use the closed source drivers, it might be worth
it to go a little higher than the geforce 4 card. A lot of people are
reporting stability issues with older cards with the newer drivers.
This includes myself. I have an MX 440 card, and although it works
fine for normal operation, if I ever have to restart the X server
there is about a 1 in 3 change of the system completely locking up.
This used to be a huge problem, because every once in a while
mythfrontend will crash, and the way I used to have it setup, that
meant that the mythtv user would get logged out, and the X server
would restart before logging back in and restarting mythfrontend.

Because of the Nvidia problems, I changed it so that instead of just
starting mythfrontend, the startup script calls mythfrontend in a
continuous loop, so that if mythfrontend dies, it just gets restarted
without the X server needing to be cycled. With that change in, my
Mythtv system hasn't needed a reboot for almost 2 months now.

The other problem for me is that if I shut down X to go to a text only
console (Assuming the machine doesn't freeze up), then the text mode
is all garbled. Since I almost never do this on my Myth box though,
that glitch isn't really a big deal.

Shawn


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