[mythtv-users] Does it matter which Hauppauge tv-card i buy???

[Michael T. Dean]

On 10/06/2007 10:14 AM, Brian Wood wrote:
> In the meantime nobody is preventing you from using a 350's output, but
> the priority of this feature is becoming less and less as it becomes of
> importance to fewer and fewer users. Doesn't this make sense?
>   

Not to mention the fact that the PVR-350 is no longer in use by any of
the devs.  If someone wanting good PVR-350 support would just write the
code and continue to maintain it...

(I, personally, have a great deal of respect for Daniel, who still keeps
up a machine with a PVR-350 for occasionally testing/fixing code.  He
does this out of kindness to those who are using a PVR-350, and there's
really no reason he would have to do this.  If someone else were
testing/maintaining the code for the PVR-350, that would allow Daniel a
little more time in which to devote his considerable talents to
improving other areas of Myth.)

> I tried driving my 32" LCD with the output of a 350, and with the VGA
> and DVI output of am nVidia card. Believe me there is no comparison, and
> the 350 loses. OTOH if I was driving an interlaced CRT display with a
> composite input using only SD material I'm sure I'd prefer the 350, but
> that's not the direction the world is moving in.

I completely agree about how one would never want to use "TV out"
(S-Video/Composite output) for an HDTV.

However, I used an NVIDIA card for S-Video TV out (with an
"old-fashioned" analog TV) for about 2 years while my PVR-350's TV out
was disabled (I stopped even loading the framebuffer module).  I found
that the PVR-350 was dirt-simple to get configured properly (and with it
you either get no output or its best quality output).  The NVIDIA TV out
was more of a challenge to configure (and allows everything from no
output to high quality output--with all the "levels" in between).  But,
once I configured the NVIDIA card properly, its output quality was no
worse than the PVR-350's (to the extent that differences were hidden by
NTSC/the analog TV/whatever).  I still maintain that the reports of the
phenomenal quality of the PVR-350 TV out are highly exaggerated and due
only to the fact that those who make the comparison have never seen a
properly-configured NVIDIA TV out.

IMHO, losing support for a PVR-350 is nothing more than losing support
for an anachronism--back around 1999, decoding SDTV on a general-purpose
CPU (in software) was a challenge, so it made sense to buy
special-purpose hardware to do this.  With modern processors, however, ...

I don't have nearly the patience for testing hardware that I don't use
that Daniel does.  My PVR-350 is in a wrapper on the shelf and I spend
my Myth coding time working on things that I'm interested in doing.

I realize this sounds like a very "accusatory" post.  I'm not trying to
say that people shouldn't use PVR-350's or that those who do cause
Daniel to waste time or anything.  I'm simply saying that the PVR-350
served its purpose in time.  Now, if anything, a hardware MPEG-2 decoder
for HDTV would make more sense--though with the rate of progress of CPU
technology, today, I would argue that the time for even that has already
passed (and with the addition of parallel H.264 decoding support in
ffmpeg--which allows virtually any dual-core CPU to decode
high-definition H.264 video--even a hardware H.264 decoder doesn't
really make sense).

I think even Hauppauge has realized this.  It used to be that you would
pay a large premium for the hardware decoder in the PVR-350--it was
about 2x the cost of the PVR-250.  Now, it's around 1.5x the cost of a(n
even cheaper) PVR-150.  There's a reason for this.  People aren't
willing to pay as large a premium for an outdated output mode (that
doesn't support HDTV, that only supports 720x480 resolution, that only
has S-Video/Composite output, that can't be used to downscale HDTV for
output on an analog TV, ...).

So, does anyone want PVR-350 support enough to volunteer "as much time
as it takes" to write/test/maintain the code for it?

Mike (not a dev, just trying to be a realistic observer) Dean