[mythtv-users] TV out card for frontend

[Steve Adeff]

On Thursday 10 November 2005 04:16, David Watkins wrote:
> 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.

For SD I used to use a Sigma Designs Hollywood Plus card which at the time had 
the best TV output of any computer card and DVD player I could get my hands 
on. I don't know how it stacks up to the PVR-350's output or if it can do 
overlays and all, but it could be a great option for low power CPU's as it 
off loads all mpeg1/2 processing.

Steve