Cards with TV-out are fairly cheap. Personally, I'd try a Matrox
G400 as they've got a very nice crisp display and can be obtained
on eBay fairly cheaply. I haven't tried the xine-plugin yet, as
I use the xine-plugin with a Matrox G550, using xine's vidix driver (xine
-V vidix) on an X11 display. The card has two connectors and I plan to use
one for connecting a TV, first by using Composite- or S-Video cable, later
by using RGB pins of a SCART-connector directly (selfmade VGA->SCART cable).
Is the second head accelerated? On the G400 and earlier, at least,
only the first head is, so you can only run one display from it if
you want decent performance. You still hook the TV up to the second
connector, but you have to configure the card to send the "first"
head to the second connector to get it working.
I'm sorry, I don't know anything about that yet. It's still on my todo list
and as my monitor (20") is larger than my TV (40 cm), it doesn't have a high
priority. Moreover, my TV's RGB input seems to be defective, too :-(("HD" in Australia means all sorts of things, from 576p to 1080i.
There's very little HD content at the moment, and generally you need
a very grunty machine to be able to play 1080i even if your video
card will drive the display at the correct resolution. So it
probably won't be worth worry about much for a few years yet.
On January 1st, Euro1080 has started to broadcast on ASTRA (4 hours a day, 3
repetions). But from time to time they just send upscaled PAL streams. Looks
quite ugly :-(