[mythtv-users] tv-out quality problems

Nick knowledgejunkie at gmail.com
Mon Oct 24 13:56:04 EDT 2005


On 24/10/05, Michael Bochynski <mbochynski at audiumcorp.com> wrote:
>  Hi All,
>
>  My setup is as follows - cable box, LeadTek WinFast TV Deluxe as tuner and
> ATI Radeon 8500 as TV-Out.
>
>  However, My mythtv TV_OUT is significantly worse in terms of picture
> quality than a direct cable out to TV. My question is whether it is due to
> ATI card, not fully supported under Linux, or TV tuner, which does software
> encoding?

I'm using ATI 9100IGP Radeon on-board video with no problems. Have you
tried your card using the official drivers and also tried the GATOS
OSS drivers? The cut-off for support of ATI cards in the official
drivers is the Radeon 8500, so you should be OK. It's therefore likely
you need to do some more tweaking (are you using S-Video to connect to
the TV?).

>  I want to replace one of those components, by my question is whether it
> makes more sense to get PVR-350 (I don't need dual tuners of 500, since I
> use cable box)  or nice NVIDIA graphics card for better support for linux?

If you find you have a supported ATI card, I'd keep that, unless
you're using some very low powered machine. I first got my PVR-350 and
started using its beautiful TV out before ATI had fixed their drivers
to get TV-out running on my Radeon 9100s. Once that support had
stabilised, I've been using the ATI for TV-out via S-Video and have
not looked back yet. The accelerated X driver for the 350 has come on
in leaps and bounds, but still doesn't offer the range of tweaking
that the regular ATI driver does, nor OpenGL support (the 9100 doesn't
have 3D support unfortunately)

In terms of watching standard def TV, the PVR-350 wins hands down
against my ATI card (the difference is noticeable). However, for the
extra functionality the ATI card provides in terms of MythVideo etc,
and future HDTV support, I'd recommend exhausting this option first.
I'm still happy to have my PVR-350 though, aside from a great encoder,
the TV-Out is brilliant when required.

Nick


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