[mythtv-users] newbie setup questions

[Ray Olszewski]

See below.

At 12:59 PM 5/29/2003 +0000, subscriptions wrote:
>Thanks guys for your advice.
>
>I will get the measurements for the space, a bit hard because it's new 
>home will be 800 miles away, so getting someone to do that for me! But I 
>imagine it would be no bigger in height than a pioneer 5.1 AMP. I use a 
>compaq EVO at work, a case that size would be great...

I don't have either of these devices handy to measure, so once more, I'd 
ask you to provide numbers.

>Basically it would be nice to know the specs for a great system AND a KIA, 
>why not look at both options....

Because there are a lot of individual tradeoffs to be made, and writing up 
specs is a lot of work. For this level of background, I suggest you look 
through the list archives, where you'll see a lot of "what I use" messages.

>and Yes, the hard disk is 120GB!!!
>
>As for the video card, I am a little confused here.... I went to 
>http://tvtool.de/ and looked at cards that only had chips that started 
>with NV** (cause I thought that meant they use the NVTV chipset?), are 
>they the best performing cards?? I was thinking of buying a...
>
>XFX Geforce2 MX400 64MB SDRAM Model PVT07G-DT With TV-out
>
>but you said...
>
> > Many work with TV out; my sense, both from my own experiments and from
> > reading the list is that newer nVidea cards, using nVidea's nvidea X 
> driver
> > (not XFree86's nv driver) give the most satisfactory performance. Check
> > www.compugeeks.com for some decent deals at least as of a few days ago).
> >
> > The Linux compatibility (actually, XFree86 compatibility) issue here is a
> > big one. You need a card that has support for both TV-out and xVideo 
> (the X
> > counterpart to DirectX on Windows). This restricts your choices severely
> > ... nVidea cards are the only ones I am *sure* support both TV-out and
> > xVideo ... though I believe *some* Savage cards and some older Matrox 
> cards
> > (the ones that use the priprietary Matrox X driver) also do.
>
>So to clarify I should look for a card that supports nividea's X DRIVER!? 
>Can you give me some examples of NIVIDEA cards that support both TV-out 
>AND XVideo?

The GeForce you refer to above is an nVidia chipset and should work fine 
(GeForce is the giveaway). But check nVidia's Web site, specifically the 
page for the Linux driver, to be certain.

The two cards I've actually tried (and I'm happy with both) are:

nVidia GeForce4 MX440-SE AGP Video Card with TV-out (sVideo and composite)
         (lspci: nVidia Corporation NV17 [GeForce4 MX 440] (rev a3))
   --OR--
nVidia GeForce2 GTS 64 MB DDR 4x AGP Video w/TV-out (sVideo)
         (lspci: nVidia Corporation NV15 [GeForce2 GTS/Pro] (rev a4))

Got them both at www.compugeeks.com a few weeks ago. Both have sVIdeo out 
(though I use them with Composite).

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