[mythtv-users] pvr350, dxr3, g400-tv & nvidia TV-out quality ?

[Heikki Julkunen]

You're right - should have avoided using sucks.. 
Anyway, this is what I have tried:

dxr3 - pretty good - picture goes all the way to the border. picture also 
has nice hue/color/brightness (similar to "normal" tv). best so far (by
pretty large margin - looks pretty good even compared to dvd).

nvidia - ok - has black frame - if adjusting timing maybe possible to 
get rid of that ? also is darker/less contrast. also has moire effects.
very hard to read normal sized text in X (640x480, even more so in 800x600).
i'm using the nvidia kernel driver - the 'nv' driver didn't support my 
card, not sure if different driver will look different. vesa framebuffer
works fine to get bios/boot messages.

g400-tv - ok - picture about the same as nvidia - more black frame though, 
but seen people have gotten around that problem. also slower than nvidia 
card. also never got vesa framebuffer to work on tv - so have to wait until 
X is fully operational (I don't have a monitor on my stb so its nice to see 
whats going on if its not coming up properly).




>If you look through the archives, you will see that the relative quality of 
>different display choices gets discussed a lot. Unfortunately, much of the 
>discussion uses terms like "sucks" or "pretty good", terms that I at least 
>find hard to interpret even when used by the same person, and impossible to 
>assign meaning to when different people use them.
>
>Also, there are many nvidia cards out there, and two X-driver options, 
>leaving me unclear as to what it actually is that you think "sucks". I've 
>personally been happy with the display of full-motion video playback using 
>an nVidia GeForce4 MX440-SE with the proprietary nvidia X driver and an 
>old-but-good 25" TV set ... the characerristics of the TV screen (its 
>anti-aliasing, maybe? I don't know) seem to cancel out some of the image 
>blurriness I see on a VGA display ... though the X display itself (xdm and 
>a blackbox desktop, hence the Myth menus as well) looks blurry and has a 
>"shimmery" quality that I usually associate with moire effects. I've never 
>seen the output of a TiVo, so I cannot use that as a basis of comparison 
>(even if we agreed on a capture quality setting to base comparisons on).
>
>Last I read, the PVR350 doesn't yet work with Myth for video out, so there 
>is no way to compare its quality to other options.
>
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