-----Original Message----- From: vdr-bounces@linuxtv.org [mailto:vdr-bounces@linuxtv.org] On Behalf Of Niko Mikkila Sent: Monday, November 14, 2005 10:14 AM To: VDR Mailing List Subject: Re: [vdr] which tv-out card?
On Mon, 14 Nov 2005 15:48:04 +0100 Leo Márquez leo@calidae.net wrote:
Hi all,
I want help a friend to set a budget cards based (dvb-t and dvb-s) vdr box in a standard computer (not micro-atx) I don't have the hardware info (only cpu athlon 1800) but the connector to be used is s-video to scart-tv. We have planned to set softdevice and use the tv-out of a vga card to connect it to the tv. Do you recommend any vga card or any kind work with softdevice?. I need directfb or only softdevice?
I have no experience with softdevice. I actually have an epia system but with a ff nexus card.
Thanks.
Hi,
I would not recommend using the tv-out of a graphics card. It will break interlacing, so you'll get a lot worse motion quality than with a FF-card or Dxr3/Hollywood+. It won't matter if you only watch movies, but for sports, news and other live video it will be bad.
If you still wish to go for softdevice or vdr-xine (I'd recommend the latter for its deinterlacing modes), setting things up will be easiest eith a cheap nVidia card and X.org instead of DirectFB. Anything newer than GeForce 4 MX440 is easy to setup for TwinView, so don't waste money on a new board if you have one of these lying around. You may not even need a window manager for X, or only a very light one (twm, fvwm) so the startup time is almost the same with that combination as with DirectFB.
Dualhead Matrox cards (G400-G550) would be better for tv-output, but they are harder to setup. With them it is better to use DirectFB and it would even be possible to preserve interlacing, but I'm not sure if softdevice supports that.
I've tried G400 and G450, both cards work great with directfb, the output almost identical to FF card except minor issues with some skins and no VDRs OSD when using mplayer. G400 tiny bit harder to setup than G450. Also first head becomes unusable, screen is blank and all you can do is use keyboard to control VDR. I did not try X on these. Right now running G400DH/16Mb and it seems to work great, runs for days without problems. I actually like this setup better than FF card, less audio sync problems, cheaper and no firmware ARM crashes.
And I've tried ATI 7000 series, 9800 pro and GF2 mx440, OSD is real bad on those, also seems to work only with X. When using directfb, I could not get OSD to come up at all. CPU usage was lower, about 10% average comparing to 30% with Matrox, thats on athlon-xp 2200+. I think FX5200 might be good choice, anyone tried it?
Also tried Dxr3/Hollywood+, TV-out is nice, OSD is much improved but still very unstable. Driver is crashing, needs to be reloaded, sometimes I had to restart whole system to get it back to normal.
--Vlad