[mythtv-users] TV out card for frontend

David Watkins watkinshome at gmail.com
Thu Nov 10 04:16:47 EST 2005


On 09/11/05, Devan Lippman <devan.lippman at gmail.com> wrote:
> Shopping for a new tv-out for my frontend and came across this at a very
> reasonable price: JATON Geforce4 MX440 Video-198PCI-64TV Video Card
> I was thinking about it though and this probably will not do any hardware
> decoding for video?  It does however have a PCI interface with svideo and
> composite outputs.  From what I hear the overscan adjustments work well on
> the geforce 4.  Can anyone think of a reason not to get this and suggest a
> better alternative, kepping in mind that it must be PCI?

I'm using a PCI Geforce4 MX440 on my combined FE/BE.  It works fine
and doesn't have a fan, which is another nice thing.  The nvidia
driver does support hardware decoding (by enabling XvMC) with it,
which significantly reduces the CPU load.  However I don't use the
hardware decoding because:

1)  It's extremely jittery when overlaying the on screen display.
2)  My AMD XP1400 (1GHz) CPU is easily capable of decoding standard
definition video in software while simultaneously recording from both
of my DVB cards.

If you have a low powered CPU, tuner cards with software encoding, or
you're looking at high definition output then you may the XvMC
enabled.


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