[mythtv-users] better tv-out cards

[Eni Gma]

Ray Olszewski wrote:

> I've been looking into TV out for awhile now, and it appears to me 
> that alternatives to nVidia are tough to find. The problem is not 
> fiddling with overscan, but the more basic one of getting the card to 
> work reasonably at all using TV out. This is a summary based on my own 
> experience plus comments I've seen here on the list:
>
>         ATI - There is no official support for TV out by ATI or in the 
> standard X drivers. While many people refer to the experimental 
> support in an abandoned branch of the GATOS CVS drivers, I have never 
> seen a report posted  anywhere by someone saying "I got this to work".


I got this to work.  I have TV-Out working on an ATI Rage II+DVD (Mach 
64), a Rage 128 VIVO, and a Radeon 7500.  However, on all 3 I still have 
the underscan problem.

>
>
>         Matrox - There is good support for TV out itself for recent 
> Matrox cards. I've tried it and it looks nice. The huge hole here is 
> that the Matrox TV-out capability does NOT support xVideo. (Currently, 
> I use a Matrox card in my Myth host, and it works fine for playback, 
> but it is too slow to support simultaneous record and playback, 
> including watching "live" TV.)
>
>         Savage - I have seen reports that the standard saveg X driver 
> works with TV out using Savage IX cards. I haven't tried this myself. 
> I have been unable to get TV out working with a Savage 2000 ... but I 
> haven't tried very hard, since this Savage card too does not support 
> xVideo.

My Savage 2k cards worked great for X on the TV, but as you say they 
don't support XV so are rather useless for MythTV.

>
>
>         nVidia - many work, with nVidia's driver. I've seen some 
> reports that some cards work with the standard X driver and nvtv, but 
> I have not seen enough detail to know if this is correct. Of course, 
> you already have an nVidia card.
>
> If there are ANY other card maker with TV-out AGP cards, I don't know 
> about them. There are, as this list discusses from time to time, 
> external VGA-to-NTSC (or -to-PAL) converters.
>
> In trying to figure out this TV out stuff, the biggest source of 
> confusion to me has been postings from laptop users. There is a lot of 
> information about using TV out with various chipsets that, when you 
> track it down, is based on tests with laptops. As far as I can tell, 
> *none* of this information carries over to AGP cards with the same 
> chipsets ... I assume the difference is that the AGP cards 
> deliberately make TV-out with unofficial drivers hard as an 
> accommodation to pressure from the media companies.
>
> Now all of this is my **best guess** about the situation. I don't 
> offer it as gospel, and I'd welcome corrections. I would encourage 
> others, though, to identify a card as working only if they themselves 
> have made it work (and, ideally, can explain how), because there seems 
> to be too much misinterpreted second-hand info floating around on this 
> topic.
>
>
>
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