[mythtv-users] MythTV w/ 2 pchdtv 5500s and 1 wintv 401 on ubuntu dapper

[Carl Youngblood]

On 8/29/06, Andrew Casper <andrew at andrewcasper.com> wrote:
> You might have better luck, but from experience I can tell you that I
> could never get the component "HDTV" output of a NVidia 6600 GT card
> to work with any media players reliably. The drivers don't seem to
> support the necessary features. Try connecting a VGA or DVI monitor
> and seeing if you have better luck. I ended up buying a VGA-to-
> Component box to interface with my TV.
>
> MythTV uses mplayer by default for playing back videos. Mplayer
> really needs XvMC to do HD on an NVidia card. You'll have to
> recompile mplayer with your kernel-devs installed and the xvmc option
> enabled.
>
> My issues were identical to yours and those two combined solved my
> issues.

Wow, thanks for the info.  I feel stupid having gone to the effort of
finding an nvidia card with no fan and component outputs.  I'm
disappointed that they don't work better, because those converters are
expensive and I have a hard time believing they will do as well as
something that is outputting 1920x1080 pixels natively.  One of the
converters I looked at says that the best output resolution to use is
1024x768, which would mean there would be some fudging at 1080i.
Overall there are not a lot of technical details on the product pages.

Speaking of which, I have found the following converters:

http://www.svideo.com/pctocomponent.html ($79)
http://www.digitalconnection.com/products/video/9a60.asp ($112)
http://www.digitalconnection.com/Products/Video/kdvtca3.asp ($169)
http://www.vpi.us/vga-hdtv.html ($70)
http://www.cablewholesale.com/specs/40h1-50200.htm ($133)

Can anyone comment on their experiences with these converters and give
recommendations?

I have both VGA and DVI outputs on my video card, so if anyone knows
of a better option that is available to me because I have DVI, I'd
love to hear it.  I found some cheaper DVI to component cables, but I
wasn't sure if they'd work:

http://sewelldirect.com/DVI/Cables/DVItoComponentRCA

Many of them said something about being designed to work with ATI
cards.  I thought all DVI outputs were the same.

Thanks,
Carl