[mythtv-users] PVR-350 and tv out simply questions

[Asciimonster]

Juan C. Gallardo wrote:

>If you use only the tv output of the pvr-350, do you see the booting
>process of the computer? (grub, etc)
>  
>
The answer to that is no. This is due to several reasons:
- In the howto's the ivtv module that controls the  is loaded after the
- The TV-out cannot display characters. When booting I see a blinking 
cursor moving across the screen as it would writing characters on the 
screen, but the characters are not show.

The question is: Is this a problem?
Well only if you upgrade the system or have a completely unrecoverable 
crash (In the last 6 month the latter happend once to me and that was my 
own stupid fault). In those cases you will need to have a monitor ready.

One problem though: with the 0.1.9 versions of ivtv it can occur that 
when you start the ivtv module the monitor is 'locked', which looks like 
it went into freeze-frame. This was termed "ivtv grabbing the monitor". 
If you google with those terms you can finf more info on that.
Simple solution: Add a boot option which does not start the ivtv module.

>Is the tv output quality of this card "very good", can you see a
>difference between this card and others?? better than a nvidia 5200
>tv-out?, or kind of the same?
>  
>
I have no experience with TV-Out's of graphics cards, but I know that 
this is also depends on the processor speed. Since you will most likely 
use a compressed format to store the recodings(lower HardDisk usage) the 
CPU will have to decode it before it's shown. With a Pentium II/slow 
PIII you just can't get the data to the graphics card fast enough. Since 
the PVR 350 decodes the data for you, your processor speed is truely 
irrelevant.

Hope this helps,
Asciimonster