[mythtv-users] Only two HD compatible cards: HD-2000/3000?

[Yeechang Lee]

Daniel Kristjansson <danielk at cuymedia.net> says:
> There are still two cards being sold now which work well:
>  * pcHDTV  HD-3000
>  * AirStar HD-5000

I have an AirStar HD-5000 and, I must say, I've had no luck whatsoever
getting this card to work with MythTV-through-ATrpms on Fedora Core
4. All existing online documentation, including www.hd5000.com, seems
to involve either a) backdating to an earlier kernel version that the
current stock 2.6.14-xxxx I'm running now, and/or b) covers the
earlier Air2PC cards. While the stock b2c2-flexcop-pci module
autodetects and loads fine, with appropriate dmesg signals, none of
the stock frontend modules (such as lgdt330x) does anything, and I
sure wish there was a straightforward way to compile just an updated
module and nothing else to modprobe for my purposes, the way that I
was able to download the driver for my PCI Ethernet gigabit Ethernet
card (a newer version of a driver with my stock kernel) and compile it
on the fly. Yes, I could roll my own kernel; I've been doing it for
ten years this January. I'd just rather not have to do it again this
time around.

> Hardware decoding for HDTV is pretty deficient at the moment, there is a
> VIA motherboard chipset which some people have reported success with and
> a nVidia 5xxx chipsets work ok with Chromakey OSD, while the nVidia 6xxx
> and 7xxx chipsets are pretty sucky when it comes to HDTV playback.

Do I understand you to say that my 6200 is actually *inferior* to a
5200 in decoding HDTV recordings for Myth? That's new to me. Heck, I'm
not even sure there *are* any 5xxx-vintage cards that are also PCI
Express-compatible, which I need in my situation.

> You'll be much happier with HDTV playback if you get a processor running
> at 2.8 Ghz or above and use software decoding.

And indeed, for the record, I've had no trouble with non-XvMC HDTV
decoding on my late model Pentium 4 3.0GHz uniprocessor
frontend/backend; in fact, XvMC still causes noticeable flickering
when OSD pops up. It's more than usable, and I'd be happy with it if I
had to resort to it, but as many others have observed (especially back
when, as I gather, Myth's XvMC support was much weaker than it is now)
it's nice to not have to.

-- 
Yeechang Lee <ylee at pobox.com> | +1 650 776 7763 | San Francisco CA US