[MPlayer-users] Re: Display card recommendations

[Arpi]

Hi,

> If you want an optimal card for *nix use, buy a G400, period. They're
> fairly easy to get on eBay or through various sites listed on
> pricewatch. G200 is also ok if you want to save a little money and
> don't need TVout (or if you're making your own TVout device like I
> did). G450 and G550 don't seem to be as well supported, and at least
> at one time they required some proprietary code to enable the TVout or
> disable macrovision or some such nonsense. Perhaps someone who's using
> one of them could clarify.

now matroxfb has full support of g450/g550, including tv-out!
it's experimental patch for 2.4.19, probably will go into 2.4.20 soon.

anyway the tvout chip on the Gx50 cards is crap compared to g400,
someone (the matroxfb author?) said it's like software modem (winmodem)
compared to hw modem.
matrox - to push price down - left the Maven chip out, and somehow emulates
the tv encoder using normal DAC and some electrical hacks.
probably something like the external vga-to-tv circuits which depend a lot
on the lowlevel programming of the dac to the right h/v/p freqs.

even if it was false info, there is big difference between g400 and gx50
tvout behaviour and programming.
the Gx50 does hw scaling from any size on tvout, at 512..1024 width.
the output image has always the same size.
for g400, the resolution was actually displayed on teh tv, with no hw
scaling, so if you set up too high or low res compared to pal/ntsc res,
the picture was broken (depending on your tv).


A'rpi / Astral & ESP-team

--
Developer of MPlayer, the Movie Player for Linux - http://www.MPlayerHQ.hu