[linux-dvb] about to buy a FusionHDTV5 Gold Plus card

[Mac Michaels]

On Wednesday 02 November 2005 12:06 pm, 
jignesh at jignesh.is-a-geek.net wrote:
> Yeah, we have a microcenter around here.  I can take a
> look to see what my options are.  I may even be able to
> get my hands on an old AGP ATI Radeon, but again, the
> problem is that the system in question doesn't have an
> AGP port.

I have an ATI Radeon X800 XL 256MB card. I hooked it up to 
my Sharp 55" HDTV monitor with 70 foot long component video 
cables to a computer in another room. The picture is great 
in 1920x1080i.  It works under windows with the DViCO 
software that comes with the FusionHDTV 5 Gold and the 
latest Windows drivers downloaded from the ATI web site.

Sometimes the DViCO application crashes when the local 
station switches from local commercials to the network HDTV 
feed. I think they must use a toggle switch at the station 
as the transition is very bad. The audio may very short 
dead spots during the first few seconds after the network 
HDTV signal starts up until it gets in sync again.
Not all the over-the-air stations have this problem.

I have not yet figured out how to get 1920x1080i from the 
ATI Linux drivers version 8.18.8. When X windows starts all 
ModeLines in the xorg.conf file are ignored and only 
default stardard definitions are available. An older 
version of the ATI driver accepted 1920x1080i ModeLines. 
Old versions have other problems that make them unusable.

> But now with Todd's suggestion of having a
> two tiered frontend/backend setup, I maybe able to get
> something going.  (However, of course, it still defeats
> my original intentions of not wanting to have two
> machines up and running 24x7.  Would like to conserve as
> much power as I can).

Only the machine with the TV tuner cards needs to run 24x7. 
This machine is usually the lower powered one as it does 
not do any real time processing of the data.

The machine connected to the TV runs only when you are 
watching TV. It has the high power graphics card and fast 
processor.

-- Mac