<div class="gmail_quote">On Thu, May 8, 2008 at 3:45 PM, Peter A. Daly <<a href="mailto:petedaly@gmail.com">petedaly@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="PADDING-LEFT: 1ex; MARGIN: 0px 0px 0px 0.8ex; BORDER-LEFT: #ccc 1px solid">I'm getting ready to build a new MythTV system and write an article<br>about the process and hardware for MythPVR.com.<br>
<br>Currently, I don't have any TV's that can display HD. My current<br>system uses a PVR-350 hooked up to a digital converter box and IR<br>blaster. I'm very happy with end result.<br><br>For the new system, I'd like to have a "native" HD card, but I want to<br>
be able to playback on my non-HD sets without transcoding after<br>capture. Is there a HD card that is supported by MythTV that can do<br>real-time downscaling to SD resolution, similar to my digital<br>converter box?</blockquote>
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<div>I do this. I have an old-school 40" Sony rear-projection TV. My backend uses a combination of PVR-500 tuners and AverMedia A180 HD tuners. I display all the content at 1024x768 to my TV through a VGA to NTSC converter (because that's what the TV likes). Myth handles all the resolution and downscaling perfectly. The only difference is that the HD content is letterboxed like a DVD on the TV.</div>
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<div>I strongly recommend that A180 for an internal PCI HD tuner. It works out of the box with the DVB drivers and was simple to set up and (as I have found) has no issues with multple cards or coexisting with SD tuners. It was a simple and straightforward upgrade to add a single A180 tuner to my system with no other changes. The biggest challenge is making sure your frontend can handle decoding the HD (P4 3.2Ghz+) or using an XvMC capable video card (Nvidia FX5200 AGP) to offload the processing.</div>
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<div>Kevin</div></div>