[NTLUG:Discuss] Video Card with Svideo

[Dan Carlson]

Do you just want tv-out, or do you also want a tuner and video capture for
your tivo-like?

The Matrox Marvel G400-TV is the best video/tv-out/tuner board I've found.
It works great under linux, although you may need a different driver than
the one included with your kernel to get it to work properly.  It has
dual-head support, although I've never used it.  The tv-out is excellent,
and its tuner is far and away the best that I've found for use in a PC.
This is probably because the actual tuner resides in a large dongle box
outside the PC box that attaches to the G400 card via a thick shielded
cable.  Presumably this cuts down on interference.  Also, the video encoder
is not a Bt878, so it can provide better results than you get with most 878
boards.

There are some gotchas with this board: 1) It is not a current product, it
was current circa 1999.  They are still readily available on eBay,
sometimes new, for around $75-100.  Because it is four years old, the 3D
support is not contemporary.  If you need the latest and greatest 3D this
board doesn't provide it.  2) The board supports hardware motion jpeg video
capture.  It is very efficient in this mode, great quality, good
compression, few dropped frames, low cpu utilization.  It also supports
software video capture, but that doesn't work as well as the hardware
capture and the cpu utilization is high.  So if you want hardware motion
jpeg capture it is a great choice, if you need software capture in some
other format, it isn't a good choice.

If you capture with hardware motion jpeg then you can use mjpeg-tools or
some other transcoder to convert the captured video to some other format
and codec, AVI, QuickTime, MPEG1 or 2, etc, but this can be cpu-intensive
and time-consuming, depending on the details of what you are doing.

Dan Carlson

----- Original Message -----
From: "MadHat" <madhat at unspecific.com>
To: "NTLUG Discussion List" <discuss at ntlug.org>
Sent: Tuesday, January 21, 2003 11:09 AM
Subject: RE: [NTLUG:Discuss] Video Card with Svideo


> On Tue, 2003-01-21 at 10:28, Paul Ingendorf wrote:
> > Are you looking for dual headed or Mirroring?
> >
> > I'm using a GeForce 2MX card with video out.  It has S-Video out and
shows
> > as two monitors in Win98SE.  However, the reason it's running win98 is
due
> > to the nvidia drivers not working right with the card in linux (tested
> > ~2002-04).  I have never tried anything but mirroring with this card
just
> > yet.
> >
> > On the plus side the card has been a good performer was fairly cheap at
~$60
> > from Altex.
>
> I am looking for something I can hook up to my TV. Kind of like a DIY
> tivo, but I want to do more than that.  Like play some games and such.
> I have a wireless mouse and keyboard and have been doing this on an old
> card, but can only get black and white and have to reboot to switch from
> monitor to svideo and back.
>
> Dual headed would be best, so I don't have to change the resolution of
> the monitor and can have the proper resolution for the svideo connection
> to the TV.
>
> --
> MadHat at Unspecific.com
> `But I don't want to go among mad people,' Alice remarked.
> `Oh, you can't help that,' said the Cat: `we're all mad here...'
>    -- Lewis Carroll - _Alice's_Adventures_in_Wonderland_
>
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