[mythtv-users] Starting Over

[Scott]

On Sep 7, 2006, at 8:59 PM, Nick wrote:
> Get a fanless 5200. In the UK I'm battling on with my ATI cards (9000
> Pro, 9100IGP and Mobile 9700 in my laptop) but we also don't have HDTV
> yet, so these cards can easily handle SDTV with the open source radeon
> driver. Plus, ATI's trackrecord of producing good drivers is not good
> either (maybe this will change now that they are owned by AMD), so I'd
> also really recommend going NVidia.

I cannot argue against nVidia when it comes to being the "preferred  
mythtv solution". Clearly it is. Still, I also decided to shun nVidia  
and go with an ATI card for my recent purchase. I picked up  fan less  
X1600Pro from Giga-byte to use in my soon to be FE/BE box.

I wanted a video card that could handle the future OpenGL  
requirements of MythTV menus. I also wasn't worried about needing  
XvMC for playback since I have a beefy-by-mythtv standards E6600 CPU  
on order as well. I really liked what I read about for AVIVO support  
ATI has in their 1K series and with the new TexturedVideo option in  
the latest Linux ATI driver it appears that it'll work for any Xv  
playback capable application. Lastly, I just think that nVidia kisses  
Microsoft's ass to much :)

Still, ATI drivers aren't always as easy to setup as the nVidia  
drivers. Or, that is to say, it seems to be easier finding nVidia  
driver packages and documentation than it does for the ATI drivers.  
If you go with ATI, be prepared to learn a bit and have to fiddle  
around with stuff.

As for which card, check out AnandTech's recent silent video card  
review at http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2825

--
Scott