This probably isn't the group for this, as I'm running XV and VDR really shines with FF DVB cards. Looks like there's very few options for s-video TV-OUT XV support in Linux. I've searched the Matrox, Savage and NVIDIA - nothing has particularly good support for accelerated s-video. I am running another VDR machine with an S3 Unichrome 2D/3D chipset and s-video - works really well! This new VDR box is low-rise though, so I need a small card....
Are you looking for a "mini-PCI" card, a low-profile PCI or low-profile AGP? A mini-PCI card usually goes in a laptop or a very tiny appliance.
Sorry, I guess I'm mixing my technologies. I'm just looking for a low-profile AGP
I'm not sure where you're getting the "no on makes good accelerated s-video for Linux", any new ATI or nVidia card has TV-out support in Linux (by using the vendors proprietary driver).
In my searching, on the MythTV support pages etc, the support for XvMC and s-video seemed very poor. I was searching Matrox, nVidia & Savage.
For an AGP/PCI card, something based on the nVidia MX-4000 or FX5200 should be cheap and low-profile.
Here's a link to a low-profile AGP card: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16814127128
And here's a link to a low-profile PCI card: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16814139174
These look ideal
You aren't very specific by "hardware acceleration" -- do you mean MPEG2 decoding, or something else? Regardless, any newish nVidia card (> Ti4xxx series), like the MX4000, supports XvMC which allows the video card's GPU to perform the MPEG-2 decoding. Xine/xinelibouput supports XvMC as an output method, so you could get fully hardware accelerated video decoding.
Yes, just MPEG decoding for use with Xine/xineliboutput
I am using an nVidia 6200TC with VDR and softdevice and my TV-out (via s-video), without any XvMC my CPU utilization when playing StandardDef content is acceptable, <30% on a Pentium-M running at 800 MHz.
I've done testing with XvMC on the 6200TC playing back a 1080i stream (via mplayer) and I get CPU utilization < 10%...that's pretty low to me.
Thanks for your help