Tony Houghton wrote:
I'm trying to find a solution to get a good TV picture for use with a DVB card. My options so far have been:
An ATI card with TV-out which scales 800x600 to PAL. The trouble with this is that quality suffers. NVidia may be better, but not much.
A DXR3 MPEG decoder with TV-out. Good quality, but there are currently a few problems with using this.
A card that supports PAL-compatible resolutions so that it doesn't wreck the quality by scaling from 800x600. I've tried a Voodoo 3 with TV-out and the same ATI as above with a VGA to RGB SCART adaptor. The trouble with this is that the interlacing on the DVB tends to be out of sync with the output and it looks terrible - literally nauseating. I can use software deinterlace filters but I seem not to have enough CPU power.
I heard there's a solution to the 3rd problem ie Matrox cards have extra
interrupts or something which players can use via DirectFB to sync the
interlacing correctly. The trouble is I can't get a cheap Matrox card
with TV-out. So does this feature also work either with the Voodoo or
ATI cards I've already got? Or, if it only works on Matrox cards, does
it work with the VGA output so I can at least easily get a suitable card
on eBay? And does it need any special patches?
I think all Matrox G450 and G550 cards have tv-out. They are not very expensive, and give excellent results with 720x576 PAL. I have a G450, it has two 15-pin VGA connectors on it, the second socket also provides the rgb/s-video/composite signals. You need a special lead for this, the required connections are on several internet sites. I think even Matrox themselves publish this info on their site.
If you use a Matrox card and use mplayer to play out the mpeg, be sure to use the dfbmga output driver as this makes the best use of the hardware.
Regards, James.
