[mythtv-users] HD on SDTV playback question

[Daniel Kristjansson]

On Mon, 2007-02-26 at 10:59 -0500, jason maxwell wrote:
> So are you guys saying that the 5200 based cards will do a better job
> rendering HD content than it's successors? or is it 5200 or newer that
> I should be looking for?
> I ask because finding either a PCI-e 5200 card, or an AGP slot on a
> modern mobo, will severely limit the possible configurations of my
> planned system.

The 5300 is the PCI-e version of the 5200, you might be able to
find it on e-bay. The 5xxx series were the last cards from
nVidia to include dedicated video hardware. More recent cards
use the 3D rendering pipeline to render video. In practice this
means you lose picture controls with normal XVideo rendering
and you can't get a colour OSD with XvMC rendering.

In the mythtv-vid branch we have been working on getting
these features with the newer cards. Colour controls are
available on later cards using the OpenGL video renderer,
and it is possible to get colour OSD with the nVidia hardware
using its XvMC copy-to-texture support, followed by an
OpenGL rendering of the XvMC texture with an OSD texture
overlayed on top.

-- Daniel