What's the consensus on video?

My test box is a PIII 800, with a NVidia Ti4280 with 64MB, VGA, Svideo and DVI. I've got a primary 21" tube VGA (Hitachi Superscan 802), and a Dell 20" Flat panel (which can accept a SVideo input, DVI, VGA and Composite). I was thinking that an SVideo port to the Dell might be a good option, but right now the framerates are so slow as to be unusable.

This morning, I could get my Hitachi to come up with a TV channel, but the framerate was very slow. I suspect I probably have to redo my XFree86 config because I swapped out a Radeon 9600 Pro for the Nvidia card, and it's not setup right.

I tried installing KnoppMyth to a new disk, so I could get the XFree86 config file off, but lilo wouldn't boot with both KnoppMyth disks in there, so I gave up this morning.


BTW, I've gotten my PCTV Pro remote working, and I've got a decent config file put together. I'm going to tweak it a little more and post it in a day or two.

pIII 800 with a software based card is not going to play livetv at a smooth framerate, at least not at full resolution. You may want to search the board a bit. I think there was someone who got it working on hardware around there at a lower resolution. You may be able to pull of recording and playing it back later if you use mpeg4. Basically that hardware is just severely underpowered for this task.

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Xsecrets

Yeah, the recommendation for PIII with a software encoder was a 1Ghz.

I guess I'm spending money one way or the other. $125 for a PVR250
or a Athlon MB/Chip/memory.

How about video out? Svideo to the flat panel or VGA to the 21" tube?

VGA is always going to give you better output than svid.

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Xsecrets

I originally played with a PIII and celly 1 GHz processors. This did not last long. I have liked AMD for some time, so I ended up going that route. Since I had an extra Athlon and Mobo laying around. With the nVidia video card you have, I think you may be happier with a PVR250. Yea it will be a bit more money, but they run very well.

and you may want to search the forums because like I said someone posted about getting a weaker proc by reducing the resolution. Since NTSC is only 480i or 240p anyways it shouldn't hurt the output too much.

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Xsecrets

From my write up on picking KnoppMyth hardware over on the WIKI:

http://knoppmythwiki.homelinux.org/index.php?page=PickingComponents

My frontend/backend is an AthlonXP 800. I record MPEG4 at 320x480 and it is smooth. I can watch live TV at this resolution, as well as watch one show and record another one. I use a GeForce4 with tv-out.

I have a separate 400 MHz PII frontend that plays this resolution pretty well. I have an old PCI NVidia card in this one for now.

Did you install the Nvidia drivers (install-nvidia.sh)? KnoppMyth will work without installing the drivers but the drivers will improve performance.

Ok. So I rebuilt the box last night off a new disk. AMD 2600 + Mobile,
Soyo Dragon Plus V1.0, 768MB memory, SB 5.1 Live, NVidia Ti4280.

I install the Nvidia driver and after a couple of reboots getting the rest of the configuration sorted out, it looks like things are working pretty well. I still need to tweak my PCTV Pro remote (My pg up/pg down buttons don't appear to be working the way I think they should).

I modified the encoder to do 720x480, and it looks a lot better than the 480x480 which was the original setting. It's still a bit grainy, but at least it's working. Is that to be expected, and should I consider dropping down to 720x480 for the display?

I don't think 720x480 is a valid tvout resolution for nvidia.

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Xsecrets

I think you're fooling yourself about it looking better, and you're probably just wasting either disk space or resolution. If you bumped up the bit rate along with the XY resolution you're wasting space. If you didn't you're wasting resolution by asking it to encode an extra 50% that you'll never be able to see with the same number of bits/sec. Seriously. 480x480 is actually a bit wider than you generally see on the screen.