[mythtv-users] Understanding how video cards and X work together

[Joe Votour]

Your onboard video card and the PVR-350 are not
related in any way.  You would play the DVD using
either the onboard video card, or the PVR-350, but
onboard video card will not use the PVR-350 (or
vice-versa).  (I'm not quite sure what you mean in
this post, you can't really daisy chain your video
card and the PVR-350, they are seperate devices).

A new video card would likely get you Xv (XVideo)
support - the PVR-350 does not have this (or, at least
it did not when I last used it).  If you have a slow
CPU, then definitely Xv will help out.

For regular X usage, the PVR-350 is a framebuffer,
with no acceleration.  Depending on the software you
use for DVD playback on the PVR-350, you will most
likely be using the unaccelerated framebuffer.  This
would not help out your situation at all, it will
still be jittery.  As a reference point, xine
complained that on a PVR-350, it was dropping frames,
even though I had an Athlon XP 2400+ (although I
couldn't really notice the frame drop).

I'm pretty sure that I read on the ivtv list that
they're working on a xine extension for the PVR-350,
which would allow for hardware accelerated MPEG-2 from
the DVD, but I don't know what the status on that is.

-- Joe

--- Scott Harris <sharris at synthys.com> wrote:
> I have a slower machine and a PVR-350.  I've been
> messing around trying to get the DVD playing
> capabilities to work without jitters etc.
>  
> Do I understand this correctly?
>  
> To play a DVD, X will still be involved before
> sending the image to the 350?
> My current on-board video card can only get me x11. 
> I'm wondering if a new card will get me xv or
> something better to take the burden off of my cpu,
> then it just passes it to eh 350?
>  
> Just trying to figure out if I'm working on solving
> the right problem.
>  
>  
> > _______________________________________________
> mythtv-users mailing list
> mythtv-users at mythtv.org
>
http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
> 


		
__________________________________ 
Do you Yahoo!? 
Yahoo! Small Business - Try our new resources site!
http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/resources/