[linux-dvb] Re: FF cards alter PTS'?

["Edward Wildgoose" <ed@wildgooses.com>]

> tv-out:
> the only tv-outs that came close to the FF´s
> were epia´s

Really?  The epia has very high quality tv out?  That's interesting

As you point out the NVida has often so, so tv out quality, but I have an
MSI fx5200 which is pretty reasonable if you tweak the settings.  Visual
sharpness at 720x576 is pretty good really (for some reason the card won't
do 768x576 which is a bind...)

> quiet:
> ive got that shiny epia board for about 4
> months. sure there is ongoing development,
> but till today you (at least i) couldnt build a
> stable stb with it and my budget.
> you could point out that any p4 could decode
> mpeg in software - but thats never quiet nor
> cheap and leads directly to the tv-out problem.

I have agonised over how to get a quiet PC.  There are a few sites
discussing techniques, but in a nutshell I found that a decent large
heatsink on a P4 (something like an slk900), with quiet and very low speed
fans (vantec 80mm), and plenty of airflow through the case (120mm fans at
5v) gives a very, very quiet machine.  The power supply is a german make
which has no fans, just a huge heatsink out of the back, and by far the
loudest thing in the machine is now the HD (5400rpm Maxtor 300Gb)

Interestingly, stuff I discovered along the way was that vibration is a huge
source of noise in a PC.  So rubber mounting all moving parts, fans, HD's is
very important.  For an easy source of rubber washers try a DIY shop for tap
washers...

Most of this is very relevant for even epia machines since they need some
fans.

I doubt though that you could rival the TT tv output easily, especially at a
comparable price.

The price thing though is not the only issue for a lot of people.  Have a
glance at www.avsforum.com and see how many people are prepared to pay
whatever it takes to get a really good system working.  VDR would help quite
a few of them very much, but they are usually scared of linux.  For many
others, it is not an option because they have plasma screens or projectors
and want to control resolution, or use fancy software deinterlacers, or
software filtering.  Also software processing of audio is becoming more
common (eg DRC).

For those people, they are probably better suited to using a DVI output from
a standard video card.

Anyway, the latest resync of FFMpeg has fixed all the av-sync issues for DVB
with MythTv and I hope the two projects might now start to feed good ideas
from each other.  For people looking for a purely software approach to DVB
playback I would definitely refer you to have a play with the latest mythtv
cvs.  VDR is still very much more developed though and I hope it will get a
really good software based decoder at some point in the future, but it's
going to take someone to develop one first (I can't see it being Klaus if he
is really happy with the excellent quality of the hardware output on the TT
cards!)




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