[mythtv-users] Performance, TV, Network, Video Cards, Identifying bottlenecks (long)

[Iohan Reyes]

Welcome to the club.  I had originally planned to use MythTV on a system that 
has an ATI Radeon 9000 card.  This card has pretty good s-video out (compared to 
nvidia's) when it's in Windows.  Unfortunately, I found out the hard way that 
TV-out for ATI cards is not supported in Linux.  I put the video card (nvidia 
geforce3) from one of my other systems into the MythTV system, loaded the 
closed-source nvidia drivers and everything works as well as it could now.  I 
hesitate to say "everything is working perfectly" because after all, this is 
still beta software and there are still some issues being ironed out, but 
considering the price and the functionality provided, I would say it is well 
worth the time and effort to get everything working.








Quoting Eni Gma <enigma at thedonnerparty.com>:




> 3.  Video Out.  As you can see from the array of video cards listed 


> above, I have tried quite a few things trying to get the video signal to 


> my television.  I need either s-vid or composite output that works in X, 


> but so far, none of the listed video cards can give me that.  Has anyone 


> used any of the cards listed above for output to a television?  When I 


> was using system #1 for freevo, I used one of the savage 2000 cards 


> listed above.  I was enthusiastic about this card, because it gave 


> acceptable video playback under freevo and the composite output worked 


> automatically under X, as opposed to all the ATI cards listed above, 


> which seem to have problems displaying X on the alternate outputs.  So 


> enthusiastic in fact, that I bought another one for use in my envisioned 


> video network.  Unfortunately, once I tried to use this card with MythTV 


> I discovered that it did not support XV accelerated output and on 


> further investigation, I don't know if they ever will have XV support.  


> Does anyone else have this card, and are there any workarounds for using 


> MythTV with cards that don't have XV support?  The card really does a 


> good job of outputting X to the TV, and I would love to be able to use 


> the two cards that I have in some capacity.  The ATI cards all have 


> tv-out support under windows, but so far I have been unable to get them 


> to work at all under Linux.  Are there alternate drivers available that 


> might help me out on the ATI front?  I have looked at the Gatos drivers, 


> but the documentation is unclear on what cards are supported and what 


> features are supported with each card.  Is there anyone that is using 


> one of the above ATI cards that successfully uses the TV-out under 


> Linux?  Or does everyone use scan converters?  All the scan converters I 


> have seen are quite expensive and I am reluctant to purchase one (or 


> many) when I have all these video cards that have the hardware to output 


> a composite signal.  None of the frontends are going to be used for 


> fancy displays, they just need to be able to output a decent composite 


> or s-video signal to a normal television.  I would certainly prefer to 


> use the many cards I have listed, but if I am unable to, can someone 


> recommend a card that will work flawlessly for tv-out under Linux?  I 


> would like to spend as little money as possible, as I have already sunk 


> a ton of money into this and I am likely to end up with a bunch of 


> hardware that I cannot use.  I have seen many posts about the NVidia 


> cards, will something like the 440 mx (or similar) give me the TV output 


> that I need?




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