[mythtv-users] latest recommendation for VDPAU PCI card

[Enigma]

FWIW, my experience with a Sparkle PCI 9400GT card was less than
stellar.  (see http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/mythtv/users/397662
).

Using VDPAU worked well and looked great when it worked, but when
playing back the playback would often exit with a "display pre-empted"
error.  It wasn't a huge deal on a short show because it was easy
enough to go back in and skip to where I was, but on something long
like a football game it got to be a huge pain because it can be
difficult to remember where you were and the playback was exiting 5-10
times on something that long.  This was with the 180.* drivers, under
the 190.* drivers when the display preempted it totally corrupted the
display and the only way to fix the display was to reboot - restarting
X did not work.  Which is a shame because this card has a ton of
overscan and the 190 driver are able to correct that.  Hopefully Myth
and the drivers will get good enough for me to be able to use this
card at some point but for now I had to revert back to my pre-nvidia
configuration.  I will probably try this card in a different frontend
when 0.22 is released.

I don't know why Myth had such a problem with the playback, when using
the card I never got any errors when using mplayer.  It may be that
mplayer handles these errors better than myth and re-started the
stream and I just never noticed.  From what I have read, the plan for
Myth is to fall back to software rendering when encountering a display
preemption rather than re-initing the display for VDPAU, for me this
won't be any better that the "An error occurred during playback"
screen since the card is PCI and chokes on software rendering.  Some
people may have had success using PCI cards with VDPAU but I'm not one
of them.