Hi, I was wondering does anyone know if there is a differnece in the quality of output from a Geforce 4 MMX and a Geforce FX??

For mythtv, is there a need for a top end gfx card? will this improve performance?

The consensus is, if you're using HDTV the GeForce 5200 FX is the "sweet spot" where further expsnse does little (or no) good. If you are not using HDTV, then the GF4 440 MX is all you need. In the case of HDTV, AGP 8x is probably worthwhile. Otherwise AGP 4x is fine.

Joe Barnhart

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Also I haven't yet used an FX card, but some say that the FX cards do have better tvout than 440mx cards. This is only applicable to svideo out. anything else you will most likely not notice the difference.

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BTW - When I was looking into this the FX 5200 cards with DVI support as well as TV Out were the ones that seemed to have the highest user satisfaction...

I'll say that the TV picture produced by the builtin MX4 in the Nforce2 IGP chipset on my motherboard is always either dim and muddy or over saturated despite many attempts to tune it. It's OK, but it's just not what it should be. DVD's burned from the same recordings and played back on a real DVD player look MUCH better.

I've noticed this too. I use DVB-T, so the recordings I make contain an interlaced MPEG-2 stream. To play them back using my myth box, the software deinterlaces them and then I assume the graphics card re-interlaces them for the tvout. This is not a lossless conversion.

Do the PVR x50s mpeg encode to an interlaced stream?

Its a shame that videocards with tv out do not support proper replay of interlaced video. (Or do they ?)

I assume that part of the reason why the picture from a real DVD player looks better is it doesnt do the de-interlace, re-interlace conversion thing.

The PVR-x50s do indeed record a correctly-interlaced MPEG2 stream that look absolutely great when you burn a DVD with them. (This is assuming you're recording at 720x480 or 352x480, which are valid NTSC resolutions for DVD. I always forget the corresponding PAL resolutions.)

The PVR-350 also supports proper playback of interlaced video through its TV-out, which is one of the big reasons people like its TV-out quality (once they get it working). So does Hauppauge's MediaMVP box.

I can't say I've tried even close to every combination of modeline, Nvidia driver, and video card out there, but everything I've seen and read suggests that there may be no way to get an Nvidia card to sync up the fields and timings of a MPEG2 stream, and output the same fields/timings through its interlaced TV out, so that the fields are preserved.

I struggled with this for some time when I first started using myth. The on-board video out of the nforce2 msi mobos I was using was just not cutting it. The picture coming from the s-video was darker and lower contrast than it should have been tv and Xv adjustments were just not getting me to acceptable levels I (read wife) was used to. My PNY Ti4200 had great quality that flexed all the complaints, but added on really annoying one. I tried about 40 different mode lines, and overscan settings. Nothing I tried over a 5 day period worked to fill the tv properly. I found a $49 5200 FX AGP card, put it in turned it on, and never looked back. I have not had a chance to see the output of the pvr350. I use 250's for capture, and have had great luck, and not interlacing problems once the new nVidia drivers came out a few months back.

My point is not whether the output from a TV-out can be made to look good. It can absolutely look quite good--better than my two TV's analog tuners as far as color, luma, and noise.

But if you have to turn deinterlacing on to avoid seeing interlacing artifacts, then I guarantee you that I and others can see a difference between the deinterlaced frames and the original interlaced fields of the source recording (at least with the current deinterlace algorithms).

Actually the default 480x480 works just fine for me... The player is the low end Panasonic S27S which can be had for $70-80 and it's played everything I've thrown at it so far... This may have something to do with the fact that it's also supposed to play video CDs which use that resolution...