Hi Everyone,

I currently have a Nvidia 440 MX video card feeding a Samsung HD Widescreen TV through S-Video. The TV is doing vertical letterboxing, and from reading the forums, it sounds like S-Video generally doesn't support widescreen input.

I would like to get widescreen format working natively from Myth to the TV, and then have Myth do the vertical letterboxing for 4:3. It sounds like the easiest way to do this is direct DVI to DVI/HDMI connection.

I looked at the Dragon video card specs, but they are all based on PCI-E. It seems like the AGP video card selection is getting sparse, especially where DVI is concerned, and they seem to generally be more expensive than a similar PCI-E card.

Can anyone recommend a cheap Nvidia based AGP video card that has DVI out and no fan? I have no expectations for the card other than being able to run Myth, so the lowest powered card available should do fine. If anyone has advise contrary to my plan, I am open to that also.

Thanks.

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Trying to install KnoppMyth R5F27, ECS 671T-M, Celeron 430, 1gig RAM, 320gig SATA Seagate, Samsung SATA SH-S203N DVD drive, Onboard video and audio, DVICO Fusion HDTV 5 Lite, Seasonic S12II-330watt PS

In my Myth Box I have an Albatron Trinity, which uses an nVidia GeForce 6200 chip.

It's a dirt cheap card (~AUD70) because it doesn't have any dedicated video RAM. However, from what I can tell that's no so important since we're not doing 3D rendering or anything.

It's got VGA, DVI and Svideo output. I can only comment on the svideo, because that's what I use with my myth box and it works flawlessly.

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My Ziki

Hey funkydan2,

Are you using S-Video in standard 4:3, or in widescreen 16:9? If you are doing widescreen, is the card outputting widescreen, or is your TV doing the zooming?

My S-Video is close to perfect with standard, I just haven't figured out how to do widescreen natively with it.

Thanks.

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Trying to install KnoppMyth R5F27, ECS 671T-M, Celeron 430, 1gig RAM, 320gig SATA Seagate, Samsung SATA SH-S203N DVD drive, Onboard video and audio, DVICO Fusion HDTV 5 Lite, Seasonic S12II-330watt PS

Get an nvidia fx5200 off ebay. Be warned that only some of them are fanless and only some of them have dvi, but if you check for both, you should be fine.

My Vizio will only accept a 640x480 signal via DVI from a computer.

I would second Greg's FX5200 recommendation. It has enough grunt to do 720p from 1080i sources, either with or without XVMC.

Only bad thing is that they do get hot. I got one with a fan, and yesterday the red output died (I am using a 5M long VGA cable, which presents a large load/impedence).

Next card, I might try a slightly better nVidia chipset, in the hope that I can drive VGA and DVI at different resolutions and frame rates without tearing.

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| Nigel Pearson, nigel.pearson.au@gmail.com
| "Things you own end up owning you" - Tyler, Fight Club

Thanks for the suggestions. I did some more research on these models and came across this extremetech article. It seems they had a problem getting the 5200 and 6150 to switch from 4:3 at BIOS POST to widescreen after, whereas their 6200 sent 16:9 from initialization.

I watched eBay for both figuring they might not have really tried to resolve the 5200 problem, but with a preference for the 6200. I managed to get an Asus N6200/TD/128M for $26. I'll update on how the switch goes. If anyone has done this before and has comments, it would be awesome to hear them. Should I expect for it to be autoconfigured, and pretty much have to do nothing besides switch to a widescreen Myth theme?

@mogator88
Does your TV accept greater resolution on the DVI from a DVD player? If it doesn't, man what is the point in the TV having a DVI input? If it does accept a higher resolution from a DVD player, something seems messed up. I wonder if it is a modeline misconfiguration?

Thanks.

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Trying to install KnoppMyth R5F27, ECS 671T-M, Celeron 430, 1gig RAM, 320gig SATA Seagate, Samsung SATA SH-S203N DVD drive, Onboard video and audio, DVICO Fusion HDTV 5 Lite, Seasonic S12II-330watt PS

I'm not sure. All I know is that if I press "W" (or the equivalent on my remote) then I can cycle through 4:3, 16:9, Full etc and it looks fine to me.

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My Ziki

I got the ASUS card and slapped it in. It did display an image immediately, and it does more than fill the widescreen. Unfortunately that is the problem now. From BIOS post, through the knoppix desktop, and in Myth, my TV is cutting off parts of the image on all 4 sides.

I looked and tried to do the following
http://knoppmythwiki.org/index.php?page=XModLines
http://www.knoppmythwiki.org/index.php? ... SetupHowTo
http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Xorg_HDTV
But it is all quite cryptic.

Option 2 here http://www.knoppmythwiki.org/index.php?page=NvidiaSetup doesn't work with my install assuming this line from step 1 starts the vncserver specified in step 2. Exiting the frontend on the second computer exits it on the television also. If you skip that and start watching live tv, you do not get a gui on the second computer. You get either a choppy TV picture, or you get a grey screen with an error message something like "failed to initialize." If I kill the frontend entirely, I can open up nvidia-settings, but I see no adjustments related to overscan.

I tried looking for the XF86Config file referenced in many places for editing display settings, and that file doesn't exist on my install. I poked around and discovered most of the relevant settings appear to be in xorg.conf. In there I set up only a 1280x720 modeline with 72hz refresh as opposed to the obscene number of modelines that had been auto generated. I also set the display size to 580x330, which is the mm dimensions of the picture tube.

At http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/Modeline_Database , it seems to imply people with Nvidia cards shouldn't have to mess with modelines at all, because it is set by the Modepool. It is not clear what the modepool is, from googling it looks like it is the range of supposedly valid modelines automatically supplied by an attached display on a DVI port. But I have seen many instances on the internet of people's displays providing invalid and suboptimal modelines. So it doesn't seem to work so good.

I know that you can do some display tweaking in Myth, but I would prefer to get it natively working so at a minimum the Knoppix desktop also displays correctly. One would think that since DVI is a digital signal, it should display correctly from BIOS post.

This is getting quite frustrating and time-consuming, can anyone give a couple recs or point me to a more understandable resource?

Thanks.

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Trying to install KnoppMyth R5F27, ECS 671T-M, Celeron 430, 1gig RAM, 320gig SATA Seagate, Samsung SATA SH-S203N DVD drive, Onboard video and audio, DVICO Fusion HDTV 5 Lite, Seasonic S12II-330watt PS

My DVD player doesn't have DVI or HDMI. I'll be buying one soon, and I'll report back.

My Vizio documentation is pretty clear that DVI from a computer will be limited to 640x480. I know that others have altered their modelines to get hi-res DVI connection but I struggled for a very long time just to get component out modelines to be acceptable, so I'm putting off the DVI for awhile.

Honestly, I think the best and easiest connection I had was s-video. It seems that everything jut "worked" without much monkey business. But I had to have HD output...

*** EDIT 9/2007 ***

I have since been able to get 600p and then 720p resolution to my Vizio from dvi/hdmi cable.