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On Mon, 2005-10-24 at 18:56 +0100, Nick wrote:
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<FONT COLOR="#000000">On 24/10/05, Michael Bochynski <<A HREF="mailto:mbochynski@audiumcorp.com">mbochynski@audiumcorp.com</A>> wrote:</FONT>
<FONT COLOR="#000000">> Hi All,</FONT>
<FONT COLOR="#000000">></FONT>
<FONT COLOR="#000000">> My setup is as follows - cable box, LeadTek WinFast TV Deluxe as tuner and</FONT>
<FONT COLOR="#000000">> ATI Radeon 8500 as TV-Out.</FONT>
<FONT COLOR="#000000">></FONT>
<FONT COLOR="#000000">> However, My mythtv TV_OUT is significantly worse in terms of picture</FONT>
<FONT COLOR="#000000">> quality than a direct cable out to TV. My question is whether it is due to</FONT>
<FONT COLOR="#000000">> ATI card, not fully supported under Linux, or TV tuner, which does software</FONT>
<FONT COLOR="#000000">> encoding?</FONT>
<FONT COLOR="#000000">I'm using ATI 9100IGP Radeon on-board video with no problems. Have you</FONT>
<FONT COLOR="#000000">tried your card using the official drivers and also tried the GATOS</FONT>
<FONT COLOR="#000000">OSS drivers? The cut-off for support of ATI cards in the official</FONT>
<FONT COLOR="#000000">drivers is the Radeon 8500, so you should be OK. It's therefore likely</FONT>
<FONT COLOR="#000000">you need to do some more tweaking (are you using S-Video to connect to</FONT>
<FONT COLOR="#000000">the TV?).</FONT>
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I downloaded official ATI drivers most recently. Since without those drivers I didn't have TV-OUT at all, I think my card is supported :) BTW, I don't have monitor at all, my kudos to VNC ! I use MythTV as DVR only, not as a linux box do do "stuff" and MythTV. It will be MythTV only.<BR>
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And yes, I am using s-video out, however not to TV, but to receiver. I set up dual outs from my cable box. One directly to receiver and one to mythtv->receiver. I was switching inputs on receiver to compare the quality of TV using the same video source. The ranking is as follows, form the best to the worst:<BR>
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1. cable box<BR>
2. tv viewing program on Linux<BR>
3. myth tv<BR>
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Note that while there is a giant difference between 1 and 2/3, the difference bet 2 and 3 is small. Which leads me to believe that this si more of ATI issue than mythTV.<BR>
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Tweaking where? in MythTV? ATI Support Panel does not offer a lot of options, besides positioning of the image, which doesn't help :) X config files?
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<FONT COLOR="#000000">> I want to replace one of those components, by my question is whether it</FONT>
<FONT COLOR="#000000">> makes more sense to get PVR-350 (I don't need dual tuners of 500, since I</FONT>
<FONT COLOR="#000000">> use cable box) or nice NVIDIA graphics card for better support for linux?</FONT>
<FONT COLOR="#000000">If you find you have a supported ATI card, I'd keep that, unless</FONT>
<FONT COLOR="#000000">you're using some very low powered machine. I first got my PVR-350 and</FONT>
<FONT COLOR="#000000">started using its beautiful TV out before ATI had fixed their drivers</FONT>
<FONT COLOR="#000000">to get TV-out running on my Radeon 9100s. Once that support had</FONT>
<FONT COLOR="#000000">stabilised, I've been using the ATI for TV-out via S-Video and have</FONT>
<FONT COLOR="#000000">not looked back yet. The accelerated X driver for the 350 has come on</FONT>
<FONT COLOR="#000000">in leaps and bounds, but still doesn't offer the range of tweaking</FONT>
<FONT COLOR="#000000">that the regular ATI driver does, nor OpenGL support (the 9100 doesn't</FONT>
<FONT COLOR="#000000">have 3D support unfortunately)</FONT>
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Does OpenGL matters for MythTV? As I mentioned earlier, this box is/will be only DVR box. I do not plan do do anything on it. Maybe a little bit of server side things, such as apache/php services, which need console access only.
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<FONT COLOR="#000000">In terms of watching standard def TV, the PVR-350 wins hands down</FONT>
<FONT COLOR="#000000">against my ATI card (the difference is noticeable). However, for the</FONT>
<FONT COLOR="#000000">extra functionality the ATI card provides in terms of MythVideo etc,</FONT>
<FONT COLOR="#000000">and future HDTV support, I'd recommend exhausting this option first.</FONT>
<FONT COLOR="#000000">I'm still happy to have my PVR-350 though, aside from a great encoder,</FONT>
<FONT COLOR="#000000">the TV-Out is brilliant when required.</FONT>
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Yeah, that's what I am looking for brilliant TV-Out. As I mentioned in my other response, I do not care about HDTV at this point, since I do not plan to have it in the next 6 - 12 months. However, I do plan to watch TV and use my MythTV box ...<BR>
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<FONT COLOR="#000000">Nick</FONT>
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Michael
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