[mythtv-users] Video Card Recommendations for TV Out

[Brian Foddy]

On Fri, 28 Mar 2003, Joseph Jamieson wrote:

> Apparently some of the Matrox boards with TV-Out (G400/G450) appear to
> work well and have good xv support.  Not all G400/G450's have TV-Out
> though.

I think the G400 is ok, but the G450 dualhead does not have TVout in 
linux.  The card itself has TVout, but the drivers in Linux don't
support it.  If you try the framebuffer solution, it will work
but no XV support, so scratch that too.  I found out these problems
the hard way after I invested in the card.

> 
> I've been hunting around myself for a video board that is the "perfect
> TV-Out solution" and I have not found one.   There's always pros and
> cons for every one.   What one person doesn't feel is important (like
> overscan) you may feel that it's very important.
> 

For the time being, I settled on a solution I found to be very
good and relatively cheap.  I picked up a G450 on ebay (thinking
it would do everything, but no).  But instead of trying card after
card, I bought a signal converter, hooked up screen 1 to the 
converter (since only head 1 has XV support), but a cheap 13"
monitor on head 2 as a console.  The video quality is very good;
much better than my TI4200 with TVout on another machine,
 and the total price was
in line with other possible solutions.  And my confidence that
it was going to work was much higher.  With the signal converter,
the video card becomes almost irrelavent with only XV support needed.

Brian