[mythtv-users] SD only Frontend video card advice

Brian Wood beww at beww.org
Wed Apr 18 07:02:21 UTC 2007


On Apr 17, 2007, at 10:51 PM, Matthew Schroeder wrote:

> First off I'd like to mention that this is my very first post to this
> list, be gentle!
>
> I
> The *sweet spot* for these ultra cheap PCI cards looks to be the  
> MX4000.
> Half the price of the FX5200 in the aftermarket.  And it supports XvMC
> (tho not iDCT).
>
> I've been told in the past that the newer cards offer greater  
> flexibility
> with the new proprietary NVidia drivers.  I was unsure if the  
> FX5200 was
> the farthest back I should reach without expecting issues, or if I  
> could
> reach further back to an MX4000 or earlier?

You could probably make that card work, but you might be making a lot  
of extra work for yourself.

Folks running Myth with nVidia-based video cards just about always  
use the nVidia drivers for them. Support for the "older than 5200"  
cards you mention is no longer present in the current drivers, so you  
have to go to "legacy" drivers, which means the automatic and/or  
"simple" installation methods used by various Linux distros will  
probably not work, and you will have to manually fetch and probably  
compile the old drivers yourself. Eventually you may not be able to  
get any nVidia drivers for those cards.

But obtaining and compiling drivers is not really that hard, and all  
the problems I mentioned will eventually happen to the 5200s as well.

So for the extra money you are buying some ease of driver  
installation, and probably some years of additional factory  
"support", such as it is.

Should you ever need or just want to sell the card you can probably  
get at least most of what you paid for a 5200 from another Myth user.  
Any card older than that will probably be close to unsalable.

Only you can decide if those things are worth the extra money, but  
there is a reason the cards are priced as they are.

Brian Wood
beww at beww.org





More information about the mythtv-users mailing list