Hi,
I am using an nVidia 6200 TC so I can also offer some perspective for "best video" card question.
I'm reasonably satisfied with the 6200, it does MPEG2 decode in hardware and it's passively cooled. I am not using DVI/HDMI, but it does have DVI+VGA+TV-out, so it should probably work fine for you.
I prefer to use softdevice for display and until very recently, there was an issue with OSD corruption. This bug has been fixed (in softdevice CVS)! So, the card for sure works with softdevice. But softdevice does NOT support XvMC and there is no indication anyone is working on that. In other words, your CPU load will be high playing back HD content.
I have also tried Xv output with xineliboutput and that seems to work fine too. Xine-lib using XvMC (or xineliboutput) seems to cause corrupted video for me, while mplayer deals with XvMC perfectly.
I say if you have an AGP/PCI system, consider the nVidia MX4000. I haven't used it myself with VDR but it supports XvMC (MPEG2 decode) and it's passively cooled. How good is the hardware de-interlacer? That is unknown to me, maybe someone else can comment.
Seppo wrote:
Perhaps not the cheapest one. I just upgraded FX 5200 to 6200, both passive cooled low end cards. The HW deinterlacer for progressive output (720p in my case) is much better in 6xxx and 7xxx nvidias imho.
How do you enable the de-interlacer seppo?
I'm not yet 100% satisfied with HW xvmc + de-interlacing with the 6200. The load in system is very low, only some % and the system is running really cool but I get video flicker (some black lines for a fraction of second) with DVB subtitles. Also the OSD has some very small vertical judder probably due to deinterlacing. Any ideas to fix these with x.org and xine settings?
What version of xine-lib and X.Org do you use?
As I mention above, I also have issues with xine-lib and XvMC on nV 6200 (whether it's xineliboutput or just playing an MPEG2 file with xine-ui). I was using xine-lib CVS June-2006, and X.Org 6.8.2.
Thanks, CR.