[mythtv-users] TV out for unlisted card?

Rod Smith mythtv at rodsbooks.com
Sat Mar 31 14:16:56 UTC 2007


On Saturday 31 March 2007 01:49, Angus wrote:
>
>     Sorry: Canada. So that 100$ I was talking about was really 84.59USD.
>
>     But I should have been clearer about what I was requesting help
> with, which is country-independent. I'm looking for an *alternative* to
> the FX5200. It seems awfully overpowered for what I need, so if I can
> get something just as compatible for less, great.

In theory, any video card that works in X will do the job, although if it 
lacks TV output you'll need a converter box, which might cost as much as the 
video card. In practice, since you've only got an 800MHz CPU, something with 
XvMC support is highly advisable, and AFAIK the only PCI chipsets with that 
support are fairly recent nVidia chipsets. Perhaps you could find something 
with an nVidia MX4000 for less, but I wouldn't try going earlier than that. 
XvMC, in case you don't know, is a video acceleration tool that lets the 
video card's GPU handle some of the decoding task, reducing load on your 
computer's CPU. This reduction in CPU load isn't huge, but it's enough to 
make a difference, particularly with an 800MHz CPU.

OTOH, XvMC is only good for MPEG-2 video, which is produced by most hardware 
encoding cards, such as the Hauppauge PVR-x50/500 series. If you're using a 
framegrabber capture card, MythTV will encode the video in RTJpeg or MPEG-4 
format, depending on the options you choose, so XvMC won't do much good. If 
that's the case, you should be able to use just about anything with X 
support, but it's possible you'll need to set less CPU-intensive video 
options, such as using RTJpeg rather than MPEG-4.

-- 
Rod Smith
http://www.rodsbooks.com


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