[mythtv-users] Any video card with interlaced TV out?

[Ville Vehvilainen]

On Thu, 25 Mar 2004, Jason Livingston wrote:

> Other than the PVR-350, which has great quality TV-out but still lacks
> stability and compatibility, are there any video cards that can output
> a proper interlaced TV signal to their TV output?

If you find an answer, do let the list know, please :-)

I'm currently using a Radeon-based card, which produces good quality video
- but only when the picture is standing still. Fast movements are much
worse than on normal TV. (This is after heavy experimentation and
tinkering with playback options and filter settings.)

I've attempted using one of my Matrox G450 cards since they are supposed
to have great TV-out quality with true interlace support, but I can't get
the standard framebuffer support to output anything my TV understands.

Using the XDirectFB server I get a good-looking picture at a sharp 720x576
resolution, but with only 16-bit colors. Since that configuration has no
support for hardware scaling/color space conversion, my 1.6GHz Duron is
not sufficient to get watchable video.

One option might be using a modded Xbox for a frontend - those have
specialized TV encoders and should produce interlaced video by default.
The cost and labor getting one to work acceptably is a bit too much for
me, however.

> the PVR-350, and the poor output quality resulting from software
> deinterlacing the video and then poorly re-interlacing it in the nVidia
> TV-out encoder...

Same thing here with DVB-based video. Movies look fine, as do many TV
shows (probably since they are recorded with movie cameras, no?) but
fast-moving, genuine interlaced stuff like sports is currently only barely
watchable,


-- 
Ville Vehviläinen <buddha at cs.tut.fi> Tel. +358 40 8491076