[mythtv-users] Dedicated hardware recommendations

[Steve Hill]

On Fri, 28 Nov 2003, Bruce Markey wrote:

> broken in the current nVidia 44xx driver. No other cards
> support this feature. AFAIK, there is no similar feature
> for the PVR-350. For cards other than the nVidia with A/V
> Sync turned on, myth will try to update the frames at equal
> intervals but has no idea when the VBI happens.

I thought XV provided a mechanism for doing updates in the VBI (I think it 
uses an offscreen buffer to build the frame and then dumps it to the video 
memory during the VBI).  Why doesn't Myth use this?

> alignment of the scanlines. However, I've experimented with
> setting the nVidia TVOverScan to 1.0, 640x480 (Nx576 for PAL)

I've already tried that on my current Myth box with Geforce4 - I set a 
modeline for 768x576 (PAL) and the Nvidia driver threw it out as an 
invalid resolution.  720x576 didn't work either.  From what I could tell, 
when outputting to the TV it won't let you set a nonstandard VGA mode.

I'm thinking about building a H/V sync -> composite sync converter so I 
can set a PAL modeline in X and then plug the TV's RGB SCART directly into 
the VGA connector, but I've seen other people saying that the Nvidia 
driver doesn't support interlaced mode at all.  Unless it will interlace, 
outputting to TV that way isn't going to work.

> I don't have a 350 for side by side comparison but if they
> are comparable, nVidia has two advantages; vsync and the
> ability to play MPEG-4 and RTjpeg files.

Can the 350 not play MPEG4 and RTjpeg?  I assumed that Myth could display 
any movies on it as if it were a normal graphics card?

-- 

 - Steve                                             http://www.nexusuk.org/

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