[mythtv-users] PCI, S-Video, VDPAU, SDTV, interlaced CRT: what card?

[James Crow]

f-myth-users at media.mit.edu wrote:
> I've got a 36" Sony CRT SDTV.  Interlaced.  Composite, S-Video,
> and component inputs -only-:  no VGA, no HDMI, no DVI, none o' that.
> Its S-Video is of the 4-pin style, not the 9-pin style.
>
> I've got a PVR-350 that obviously won't be supported for long.
> Especially since I'd like to transcode my SDTV to H.264 (to save 2-3x
> in space, I hope, in a very large corpus) and play it back using VDPAU
> instead.
>
> The frontend I'd like to put it in has PCI and AGP.  No PCI-X,
> PCIe/PCI Express, or any o' that, either.  (And get off my lawn!)
>
>   
Most of my experience may not apply because I was able to use a PCI-E 
card, but I had a 8400GS card connected to a SD TV set with a svideo 
cable. I was not running VDPAU and its deinterlacers. This was over a 
year ago and I was able to display Myth just fine. I upgraded to a 42" 
LCD soon after and have not hooked my machine up to a svideo TV since. 
AFAIR I used a svideo cable hooked into the adapter supplied with the 
card. I do remember the quality was nowhere near as good as the TV 
tuning an analog channel. Sine then I have upgraded to VDPAU and the 
deinterlacers from it rival those built into my LCD TVs.

As for fanless versus a fan, if you have room in your case it is not 
hard to turn an 8400 into a fanless model. I did. Here is a blog post 
about it: http://jamesanddiana.com/blog/?p=9

This is the card I used: 
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814139018

Cheers,
James