[vdr] Re: Interlacing

[Lucian Muresan <lucianm@users.sourceforge.net>]

Tony Houghton wrote:
> Some disadvantages with Matrox:
>
> AFAIK the TV-out doesn't work with X, at least not with the mga driver,
> but it might be possible to do something with X's vesafb driver.
Well, that depends if one sees this as a disadvantage. I bought the G400 
especially for building a HTPC on which I refuse to install X. The 
alternative would have been Nvidia + X + hardware Xvmc, but as I opted 
for DirectFB which simply looks great when properly setup on a Matrox, 
that's how I see it...
A dxr3 or a FF DVB card may do MPEG1/2 decoding very well and may have a 
very good picture quality, but so do most domestic DVB receivers too. If 
I do DVB on a PC, I want it do more than that, decode various other 
formats without transcoding first at the expense of CPU cycles which I'd 
rather put into decoding, decode even HDTV (MB + CPU upgrade) when the 
time is right for that, so current hardware decoding solutions are too 
limited for that. And my curent 1GHz Duron which doesn't know about any 
power-saving techniques (like modern AMD64 desktop-targeted processors 
know already at present) is quiet enough when just decoding MPEG2. I 
only switch on 2 aditional fans when I have to compile things for a 
longer time (because I'm using Gentoo, compile everything with optimezed 
flags). So regarding noise levels on software-decoding solutions, things 
can be improved, and will improve further, especially when choosing the 
right hardware.

> Last time I looked, none of the Matrox cards available at reasonable
> prices on eBay included TV-out.
True, they're not very cheap. I bought mine for 30-40€ on the german eBay.

> The above HOWTO mentions kernel patches for 2.4.*, so the situation with
> 2.6 is unknown to me at present. Other guides say a closed binary HAL is
> needed, which I was never able to find for download.
Yes, that's true, I also was enlightened by Ville Syrjälä on the DFB 
mailing list that in order to use a 2.6 kernel you have to use the CVS 
version of DFB, and compile it with sysfs enabled. And the weird thing 
is that the howto was still good up to a certain version of the 2.6 
kernels, I gues 2.6.5 or so, then something changed in the kernel (I 
don't remember very well, I guess the procfs support or something, and 
then they had to use sysfs to find the i2c devices on the system). 
Anyway, I have it running for several 2.6.x kernel versions (2.6.9 at 
the moment), and it's really not too hard to setup, although the howto 
is not 100% up to date.

Lucian