[mythtv-users] Hauppauge cards...

[Scott Alfter]

On Fri, Oct 15, 2004 at 09:52:09AM -0500, Buchanan, Paul (West) wrote:
> > Would it be worth the extra money to get the PVR-350?
> 
> Possibly.  The advantage of the PVR-350 is very high quality TV-out of
> MPEG2 content.  I've never seen the output myself, but I hear it blows
> everything else out of the water.

My MythTV box is equipped with a no-name Geforce FX5200 and a PVR-350 (plus
an Avermedia M179, which is similar to a PVR-250).  I set it up with the
PVR-350 at first as the video output, but switched to the video card for a
while after replacing a blown motherboard and processor.  I don't think I
was ever able to get the video card to run with enough overscan to get each
line of input video to match up with a line on the TV, so anything
interlaced looked nasty (especially film that had been through 3:2 pulldown,
which accounts for nearly everything on TV that isn't live).  I'm back to
using the PVR-350 output.

If you're using a high-resolution monitor of some sort (whether a computer
monitor or HDTV monitor), VGA or component output might work better.  If
your display device is any sort of NTSC display, though, the PVR-350 really
is about as good as it gets.  The only downside is that its framebuffer
isn't all that fast.  (That's most likely a driver limitation at this point,
as it's gotten better over time.  Mozilla works reasonably well through the
framebuffer, at least, as do the MythTV menus as well.)

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