<html><body bgcolor="#FFFFFF"><div><br><br>On 28 Nov 2010, at 05:25 PM, Brian Wood <<a href="mailto:beww@beww.org">beww@beww.org</a>> wrote:<br><br></div><div></div><blockquote type="cite"><div><span>On Sunday, November 28, 2010 10:17:15 am Robert Longbottom wrote:</span><br><span></span><br><blockquote type="cite"><span></span><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><span>I have a pci gs8400 card (I think that's the right chipset number)</span><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><span>from Sparkle. That's in an old ish Pentium 4 something or other.</span><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><span>I've used it in the past as a second frontend. It was incapable of</span><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><span>playing hd without vdpau, but with the pci card and vdpau it works</span><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><span>fine.</span><br></blockquote><span></span><br><blockquote type="cite"><span></span><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><span>The only issue that I had was that I had to leave the old graphics</span><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><span>card in there as well or the system wouldnt boot at all. It's like</span><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><span>it can't handle booting from the sparkle card for some reason. This</span><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><span>was / is a bit of a pain because it means you get nothing on the</span><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><span>screen until X starts. (unless I unplug the monitor and plug it into</span><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><span>the graphics card!) But once you have everything up and running it</span><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><span>works flawlessly.</span><br></blockquote><span></span><br><span>How about the OSDs? Are they OK?</span><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#000000"><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#0023A3"><br></font></font></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>Yes, the osds were fine - I assume you mean during playback? Everything just worked.</div><br><blockquote type="cite"><div><span>May I ask what mobo you are using? Most of them have a BIOS setting to </span><br><span>tell it what graphics card to use first, this might correct the booting </span><br><span>problem.</span><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#000000"><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#0023A3"><br></font></font></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>No idea. It's a small form factor HP business pc that I got from work when they were selling them off for £30 as part of an upgrade. </div><div><br></div><div>I did have a fiddle around with the various settings in the bios but never managed to find a combination that worked. I think I ended up wit the on board graphics disabled, an old-ish nvidia agp card and the Sparkle pci card in it. That's the only way it would boot! The bios and text console display on the agp card and I configured X to run on the pci card. </div><div><br></div><div>Sadly the agp card wasn't new enough to do vdpau and I couldn't find a low profile agp card that would. Thankfully the pci slots were turned on their side it would take a full height card. </div><div><br></div><div>The only other problem was that the massive heat sink on the pci card blocked both if the pci slots. Hence it was a frontend only. </div><div><br></div><div>I've not actually used it for ages, but I'll bring it back into service at some point. </div><br><blockquote type="cite"><div><span>But I could certainly put up with no video until X is running if I had </span><br><span>to. I'm mainly just trying to get some use out of "obsolete" equipment.</span><br><span></span><br><span>Thanks for the input.</span><br><span></span><br><span>_______________________________________________</span><br><span>mythtv-users mailing list</span><br><span><a href="mailto:mythtv-users@mythtv.org">mythtv-users@mythtv.org</a></span><br><span><a href="http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users">http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users</a></span><br></div></blockquote></body></html>