[mythtv-users] Why do they put VGA on Mother Boards anymore?

[Shawn Rutledge]

On Thu, Feb 28, 2008 at 1:42 PM, Chris Ribe <chrisribe at gmail.com> wrote:
> The confusion and anger quickly disappeared as soon as I hooked up one of
> the computers to one of the monitors.   The picture is perfect at 1680x1050.
> For years I have been heavily biased against VGA connections to LCD monitors
> because I have seen plenty of setups where using VGA instead of DVI resulted
> in a slightly blurry picture.
>
> Something has improved dramatically since then, though.  I don't know if it
> is the graphics chip, the monitor, or some combination of the two that is

I'm pretty sure it's the monitor.  But it's still an ugly kludge.
When you think about how they do that you should hate it just for
that.  It's like ripping a CD by connecting the analog output to your
sound card... you just wouldn't do that, because it's guaranteed there
are going to be some artifacts.  Maybe you can't see or hear them, but
it's enough to know that they are there, and the digital samples you
captured are not going to be aligned with the digital samples that
were recorded on the CD.

> responsible, but there doesn't seem to be anything to be gained with a DVI
> connection on the newest hardware.

I have a Dell 24" monitor (2405).  To get pixel-perfect alignment from
my system with only analog output, I had to set the background on one
virtual desktop to the old X black-and-white stipple pattern.  I
switch to that desktop and hit the auto-align button, and the results
end up pretty decent, although I can still see some flickering.  But
sometimes it decides to auto-align on its own (like when switching
from X to a virtual console or back), gets it wrong, and then I have
to do it manually again.  Sometimes I have to do it repeatedly to get
good results.  But that system (not the MythTV one) is old and I have
an AGP FireGL board in it, which performs well and has 100%
open-source drivers, so that's why I'm putting off the upgrade; but
nevertheless I will need to upgrade soon.  My wife's system has the
Dell 19" monitor, and its auto-align doesn't work as well.

There's no question DVI digital is better when it works.  But another
issue is that 1920x1200 requires reduced blanking.  I have another
system (for Windows and for playing with Linux distros other than
Gentoo) which has DVI and it doesn't always work; sometimes the whole
screen blanks periodically, and to get it stop doing that I have to
power off the system and then boot again.  I guess it's a driver bug
because when I run Ubuntu on the same system that doesn't happen.
Anyway it seems short-sighted that when DVI came out, there were
already higher-resolution monitors available than what it could
handle.  (Consequently I'm pushing the maximum number of pixels that
it can handle already, and wishing I could have more.)  Dual-link
feels like a kludgy workaround.  But there is a new standard in the
works anyway... hopefully this time they look forward a bit and design
it to handle higher resolutions than what we have so far.

My Myth machine refuses to display text mode over DVI when connected
to my projector.  I hate that.. and if I connect an analog monitor
(even if it's turned off) then X will come up on the analog output
rather than DVI even though the projector is also connected.  So it
has to be just one or the other.  This is with a modern GeForce board
that I just bought a couple months ago (7100 maybe?  I forgot).