[mythtv-users] What to do with playing HD on 'normal' TV?

Len Reed crunchyfrog at charter.net
Fri Mar 3 16:54:40 UTC 2006


Chad wrote:
> Hello!
> 
> I've got a Home Theater that I use to watch my "shows" (CSI, Las
> Vegas...) in High Def.  I've also got several other 'regular' TV's
> floating around my house in various places.  1 of these TV's is so old
> school, I have to use an RF Modulator to get a computer to hook up to
> it via a composite output on a video card.

For me it "just works".  Here's my setup.  Everything is connected by 
100Mb or Gb Ethernet.

1. Master system.  Backend with highdef recording (and NTSC), and 
frontend, connected to high-def TV.  Athlon64x2.

2. Second backend, no frontend.  NTSC recording.

3. Part time front end.  Nvidia card with Svideo to NTSC TV.

#3 will show highdef recordings and letterbox them, scaling them down to 
NTSC.  Everything happens just fine, on the fly.  No transcoding needed. 
    I made no special modifications to the setup or the code.  I was 
surporised and pleased that it worked so nicely out of the box.

There's a potential rub, though.  The computer driving it is primarily a 
development workstation; it's used as a front-end when I'm not working. 
  And it's a dual-Xeon 2.4 GHz machine with 2GB RAM and hyperthreading. 
  It has a dual-headed Nvidia card so that the workstation is usable 
even if the mythfrontend is driving the TV.  I can change the aspect 
ratio to anything I want (W key).

So...the on-the-fly scaling might not work at all with lesser-powered 
machine.


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