[mythtv-users] [OT] Hardware (video and audio card) questions, differences and features?

Johan Venter johan at vulturest.com
Wed Dec 28 02:50:06 EST 2005


Chad wrote:
> Hello!
> 
> I'm looking for an easy-to-use website that will explain the
> differences of the nvidia cards to me.  MythTV says I need a Geforce 4
> or better to do XvMC, but I've got an MX440 and it barely (nearly
> unusably) does it.  I am looking for a faster/better/newer card and
> want to know the difference in the 5200, 6200, 6600, GT versions of
> those, the 4000...

I use the SVideo out on an MX440 and had little luck with XvMC in 0.18.2 
(the fixes release), but am having far more luck with the latest SVN - 
it's totally watchable and lowers my CPU usage quite significantly (to 
the point where HD channels used to be unwatchable, but now only 
ocassionaly skip with a 'pre-buffering pause').

> I'm looking for a card that actually works (well) in linux/mythtv with
> it's Digital Coax output.  I have yet to actually be able to get
> anything to play through my digital out and have my receiver pick it
> up as a Dolby Digital sound source (when it's a HD recording with DD
> audio).

Believe it or not, I'm using the AC97 onboard audio on a KT600 chipset 
mainboard through the SPDIF out.

All I did was enable IEC968 output in alsamixer, turn IEC968 playback 
all the way *down* (it seems to work in reverse?), and pointed Myth to 
use alsa:spdif as the output device.

For mplayer, I use a command line similar to:
   mplayer -fs -zoom -quiet -vo xv -ao alsa:device=spdif -ac hwac3,
(NOTE: extra ',' at the end is required, tells mplayer to fallback to 
other codes if it can't access hardware ac3, or the stream is not ac3 at 
all)

> The best I've gotten is a loud repeated 'beat' (which is my best
> description, I would guess it's an analog version of the digital
> pulse?) which I quickly mute or kill.  I've tried/used a cmipci, an
> emu10k1, and onboard via-82xx, all through very new versions of ALSA,
> with no avail.

That's it, my AC97 chipset uses the via-82xx driver.

Regards,

Johan


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