[mythtv-users] Hardware for Best TV-Out?

Dan Lanciani ddl5 at danlan.com
Sun Oct 24 22:37:12 UTC 2004


Joe Votour <joevph at yahoo.com> wrote:

|I know that this has been discussed half to death, but
|I'm still trying to figure out what the best possible
|setup for TV-Out is available.

[...]

|3. Scan converter (VGA to NTSC)
|Pros:
|Easy connection/configuration
|
|Cons:
|Same results as the nVidia.  Not worth the money,
|unless I can get good results.

Keep in mind that a "real" (yet still not broadcast quality) RGB to NTSC
encoder is going to cost ~$500--and that is for an encoder *only* with
no rate conversion.  Not that I think a high quality encoder would really
help from what I can see of nVidia's output.  A transcoding TBC might help.
Unfortunately, mine has the component input option rather than RBG so I
can't try it. :(

|Like I said earlier, I realize that this has been
|hashed out to death, but can anybody give me some
|suggestions on what I can do to improve the TV-Out
|quality?

I'd love to get an answer on this as well.  As it stands I'm about ready to
give up on the project on the theory that what I want cannot be done.  Because
my source is ATSC the PVR-350 is not supported for output, and from what I've
seen generic video card TV-Out technology has not advanced much since my last
exposure.  The problem is that generating a reasonable quality NTSC signal is
not trivial (TV Typewriter Cookbook to the contrary notwithstanding :).  You
can't easily tack on cheap TV-Out functionality to a VGA card and get quality
results.

|Cost (for hardware) is (within reason) not
|an issue, but it has to work.

Ditto.  My other thought was to run IEEE1394 to a Sony DVMC or Miglia box
since they have high-quality "hardware" CODECs.  Unfortunately, that runs
into the dynamic transcoding problem again so it isn't supported and/or would
take too much CPU.

				Dan Lanciani
				ddl at danlan.*com


More information about the mythtv-users mailing list