The quality with PVR-350 output is undoubtedly superior. The actual MPEG decoding is done in hardware, so there is no unnecessary scaling (normal video cards actually rescale the image regardless of what you do since they output an image that has some amount of border to compensate for overscan) and the interlaced video image is preserved, so it is smoother.
However, you may not want to do it. There are still a number of Outstanding Issues (TM) with pvr-350 output.. mostly with the IVTV driver, which is still in a very raw state. Ocassionally you will find that the output will simply lock and fail to display anything until you restart. Also, there are a lot of issues in MythTV with it; for example, the screen will go black until you press a button when exiting the EPG (or when you bring it up while the channel number is still fading out after changing channel). You also cannot output anything other than MPEG-2 video, and have it work properly, since outputting anything else requires the use of the card's on-screen display, which is a dumb framebuffer not really designed for video speeds. Also, be aware that the size of everything (other than recorded video) will be very slightly distorted, as X11 operates directly at normal TV resolution (720x480 resolution, with a pixel aspect ratio of 1.1 -- slightly non-square pixels). This is something you will be very aware of if you want to display photos. On Fri, 18 Mar 2005 23:08:58 -0500, Scot L. Harris <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > For the past few weeks I have had enjoyed a working mythtv system. I > currently have it setup using the PVR-350 as output which has a few > quirks but seems to work well. > > During the initial testing I just used the monitor connection for output > which worked very well. The menus seem to look better than when using > the PVR-350 output. > > I have an FX 5500 Nvidia card in this system that has an S-video > output. I assume that if this output was used that I would have the > same output as I did when using the monitor. > > The question is will this output be similar or better quality than the > PVR-350 output? And is it worth the time and effort to set this up and > test it? > > I assume this will utilize more CPU than the PVR-350 output. I have a > 3.6 GHz pentium in this particular box so I don't expect that to be an > issue. > > -- > Scot L. Harris > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > 1: No code table for op: ++post > > > _______________________________________________ > mythtv-users mailing list > [email protected] > http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users > > > -- Ian Trider [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ mythtv-users mailing list [email protected] http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
