I am planning on building a second Mythbox to record HD OTA shows. However, I'm not savvy with driver issues & troubleshooting. Do you know of any video card that is the following?:

* PCI-Express (I will have a 16x slot available)
* HDMI output
* Works out-of-the-box (or at least w/o major issues)

Thanks!

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R5.5; PVR-250; FX5200; Dell 4300 with Intel Pentium 4 (1.5 GHz);
BIOS Revision A02; 512MB RAM; 500GB PATA HDD

Last I heard, all the HDMI outs were a bit squirrelly, at least as far as the audio portion of the connection goes.

HD video connections with either DVI or HDMI seem to depend more on the TV than the card. For some reason TV manufacturers can't get it into their heads that overscan is a bad idea.

What are you connecting the mythbox to?

This isn't exactly what you were looking for, but it might help. I am using an AGP card that has DVI out. (gforce 6200LE) I connect it to my TV set using a cable that has a DVI connector on one end and an HDMI connector on the other end. Works without problems. So I suspect you can use any video card that has a DVI out.

THe gforce 7200 and 7300 are both available as PCI-express cards and have DVI out. I have not tried them with mythtv.

marc

It will output to a Pioneer plasma (HD-1110). I'm using this tv with my current Mythbox setup, but never for any HDTV application. With the new box, I'm hoping to make use of all that extra resolution.

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R5.5; PVR-250; FX5200; Dell 4300 with Intel Pentium 4 (1.5 GHz);
BIOS Revision A02; 512MB RAM; 500GB PATA HDD

This is true. There's converting cables like you describe, and little adapters, that have a male DVI on one side and a female HDMI on the other. I'd shop around for the best price.

The downside of the adapters/cables is that they don't do audio, which is a big selling point of HDMI over DVI. It's one cable so Joe Sixpack gets less confused hooking the DVD to the TV.

In this situation, if the audio is going elsewhere (like a reciever) anyway then the no-audio-on-the-cable problem is no problem at all.

Also, if you have the TV's manual handy, I think that set actually has a VGA input. (It may be called "15-pin," "D-sub" or just "computer" input, or any combination of those.) It's not a fancy-schmancy digital connection, but it is a sure thing to get working...

While I'd prefer HDMI, if someone knew of a DVI card that was PCI-e and fairly trouble-free for HDTV, I'd be OK with that.

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R5.5; PVR-250; FX5200; Dell 4300 with Intel Pentium 4 (1.5 GHz);
BIOS Revision A02; 512MB RAM; 500GB PATA HDD

Nearly all are DVI these days. Try an NVIDIA 7200GS or 7300GS: Just about the cheapest cards on the market, and give a lovely digital picture (nice and bright).

Mike

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LinHES 7.4
Australian Dragon
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Here is a link to a bunch of fanless nvidia 7xxx PCI X16 video cards that all have DVI connectors. The first one on the list, a 7300GT, is $17, shipped, after $10 rebate.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductLi ... 53%3A18921

The 7xxx cards are fairly cheap right now.

Stay away from any that have something like "512 MB (128MB on board)" in the description. That means they will 'steal' system RAM up to the stated max RAM amount.

Nice Tip! I hadn't noticed that little trick before. I recently upgraded my card, (replacing a dead card, really) Now I'll have to dig out the box to make sure...