[mythtv-users] Hardware ideas

[David Wood]

This is really helpful, thanks! You reminded me just now that I've seen
other success stories about the 9200 as well. Sounds like that's the card
to get.

I did have my doubts about the mx440 s-video quality. I've been fighting
with "afterthought" s-video on nvidia cards for a while (I've had two).
The latter, ti4400, is passable but that's in windows.

Now I'm definitely leaning towards software encoding+decoding. Cheaper and
perhaps better?

On Fri, 25 Jun 2004, Clyde Stubbs wrote:

> On Thu, Jun 24, 2004 at 04:35:36PM -0400, David Wood wrote:
> > Now I am thinking of maybe going in another direction altogether and just
> > relying on the CPU, using something like an AverTV stereo (bttv) and
> > mx440. This would be cheaper and maybe easier, given that (I think) I have
>
> If you want TV-out, I recommend staying away from the MX440 - the closed
> source drivers lack various features like interlacing, and the picture
> quality from the on-board TV encoder is disappointing. The open-source
> drivers have dismal performance.
>
> OTOH, the Radeon 9200SE works very nicely with open-source drivers. I have
> the following setup:
>
> nForce2 mATX m/b (on-board video disabled)
> Radeon 9200SE video
> Athlon XP2400+
> WD 200GB drive
> Two DVB-T cards:
>    Avermedia DVB-T 771
>    Nebula DigiTV
> All in a fairly ordinary black midi-tower case
>
> and a One-For-All learning remote.
>
> This setup works very well driving my Yamaha amp and a Sony TV using
> PAL 50Hz interlaced. CPU load watching TV is around 15%, jumping
> to 30% if I turn on PIP - essentially it's all in the MPEG decoding.
>
> If you're going to be using analog TV cards I guess there will be more
> CPU load due to the MPEG encoding.
>
> I've just ordered an Antec Aria case to rehouse this, along with a second
> 200GB drive (have filled up the first one with DivX movies).
>
> Have fun!
>
> Regards, Clyde
>
> --
> Clyde Stubbs                     |            HI-TECH Software
> Email: clyde at htsoft.com          |          Phone            Fax
> WWW:   http://www.htsoft.com/    | USA: (408) 490 2885  (408) 490 2885
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