[mythtv-users] better tv-out cards

Markus Scholz macdanger at web.de
Fri May 9 10:47:30 EDT 2003


Hi all,

I did much research too to find a graphic card that hit the following
criteria:
1) The card must not have any fan on it because the PVR resides in the
living room

2) the card must be supported with any video acceleration in XFree86 4

3) it must have a good quality tv-out that can easily be turned on
with simple options in the XFree86 config file

4) the biggest point: the tv-out must be configureable so that the
overscan and position can be adjusted

I ended up with a nvidia GF2 MX (ASUS 7100-T, 32MB) witch I bought at
ebay:

1) the GF2MX cards do not have any fan
2) currently the nvidia drivers are very nice concerning speed and the
supported featurs. The only bad thing is, they aren't open source.
3) yes, tv-out can be very easily turned on in the XF86Config file
4) the best tool for adjusting the tv-out under linux is nvtv. But
this only works with nvidia cards and only dedicated tv-encoder-chips
(see doc/chips in nvtv-package).

The tv-out-encoder chip is the most important thing here. It is mostly
responsible for the quality of the picture. The other thing is, the
chip has to have a free available documentation so a programmer can
write tools for it. The connexant (ex BrookTree) chips are the most wide
spread tv-encoder chips and are open documented.
But be aware of buying a GF_4_MX card! They have an integrated
tv-encoder chip witch is not documented (seems to be nvidia's general
policy), so there is no way of using any tool like nvtv to adjust the
tv-out.
So, if one wants to buy a tv-out card for MythTV (or even for Linux) I
can only advice to buy a nvidia card. But ensure u buy one with an
none integrated tv-encoder chip and that it is a connexant.
Phillips is selling more and more of his tv-encoder chips in the last
time, too. The quality of the latest chips is nice and they have the
ability to scale up to 1024x768 (connexant only up to 800x600). But I
don't know how far they are supported by nvtv.

After all I think it could be realy nice to have a scanconverter to
convert vga to s-video. With this u are more flexible but they aren't
cheap. The quality is mostly far beyond the tv-out quality of any
graphic card. On the other hand the nvidia card cost me only around
30€ at ebay ...

I hope that helped a bit

BTW I didn't test the overscan option of the newest nvidia drivers but
I'll guess they aren't as comfortable as nvtv is.

greetinx Markus


> Hi,

> On Thu, 2003-05-08 at 12:44, Joseph A. Caputo wrote:
>> I have an Nvidia GeForce4 MX 420, and have had nary a problem getting any
>> aspect of the card to work great.  My only complaint to date has been the
>> lack of over/underscan support, but the latest drivers from Nvidia seem to
>> support this in the XF86Config file, so maybe I'll give them a try at some
>> point.
>> 

> Just thought I would point out that in the docs for the nvidia driver it
> says:

>     Overscan is currently only available on GeForce4 or newer GPUs
>     with either NVIDIA or Conexant TV encoders.

> This is in APPENDIX J: CONFIGURING TV-OUT of the README.


>> -JAC
>> 
>> _______________________________________________
>> mythtv-users mailing list
>> mythtv-users at snowman.net
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> Cheers,

> Scott



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