On 24/10/05, Michael Bochynski <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hi All, > > My setup is as follows - cable box, LeadTek WinFast TV Deluxe as tuner and > ATI Radeon 8500 as TV-Out. > > However, My mythtv TV_OUT is significantly worse in terms of picture > quality than a direct cable out to TV. My question is whether it is due to > ATI card, not fully supported under Linux, or TV tuner, which does software > encoding? I'm using ATI 9100IGP Radeon on-board video with no problems. Have you tried your card using the official drivers and also tried the GATOS OSS drivers? The cut-off for support of ATI cards in the official drivers is the Radeon 8500, so you should be OK. It's therefore likely you need to do some more tweaking (are you using S-Video to connect to the TV?).
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.
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:
1. cable box
2. tv viewing program on Linux
3. myth tv
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.
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?
> I want to replace one of those components, by my question is whether it > makes more sense to get PVR-350 (I don't need dual tuners of 500, since I > use cable box) or nice NVIDIA graphics card for better support for linux? If you find you have a supported ATI card, I'd keep that, unless you're using some very low powered machine. I first got my PVR-350 and started using its beautiful TV out before ATI had fixed their drivers to get TV-out running on my Radeon 9100s. Once that support had stabilised, I've been using the ATI for TV-out via S-Video and have not looked back yet. The accelerated X driver for the 350 has come on in leaps and bounds, but still doesn't offer the range of tweaking that the regular ATI driver does, nor OpenGL support (the 9100 doesn't have 3D support unfortunately)
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.
In terms of watching standard def TV, the PVR-350 wins hands down against my ATI card (the difference is noticeable). However, for the extra functionality the ATI card provides in terms of MythVideo etc, and future HDTV support, I'd recommend exhausting this option first. I'm still happy to have my PVR-350 though, aside from a great encoder, the TV-Out is brilliant when required.
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 ...
Nick
Michael
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