Best Video card for SageTV

[ben_gb]

Hi,

I'm building a client-only PC for viewing SageTV from a server over my network.

Does anyone have any views on what the best choice of video card would be?

I guess that one with an onboard hardware MPEG decoder would be ideal.

For my purposes it would be best if it can be used as the main video board, on the S-video output port, and can also have an OSD in SageTV's full screen mode.

Any thoughts?

Regards,
Ben

[olyar15]

Guess that depends on whether you are hooking up to a computer monitor (or something that can accept computer signals like a plasma or DLP display) or a regular TV. Many people use ATI Radeons because they seem to have a better picture. You can use their VGA->Component dongle, or just get a VGA to component transcoder if your TV support component in. Or if possible just plug the VGA from the vid card directly to display.

I think all recent video cards have some form of hardware motion decoding of some sort.

Can't help you about the S-video out.

[pocketmoon]

What we need is one of the 'tech' websites to do a comparative review of cards with s-video output. It's something thats always overlooked with the mainstream leaning towards 3d performance rather than 2d quality.

There's a massive growth in the number of people building pvr's and HTPC using Small Form Factor PC's etc and there's a gap in the market for a decent website dedicated to that.

Each of the individual product and components have thier own support sites (Sage, myHTPC, MythTV, Via (mini-itx) PVR250/350 etc etc) but I haven't found a site that pulls them all together in a vendor agnostic way.

We are reduced to heresay, passing comment and legend to try and guess which cards give the best output to TV.

I'm planning on picking up a mini-itx M1000 based system with built in mpeg2 decoder and s-video (probably the silent one from tranquilpc.co.uk) and using that as a testbed. I have a 32" widescreen TV so quality of output is a priority. The plan is then to beg/borrow some PCI graphics cards (ATI 7500 ? G450 ? FX2000 ?) and do a big comparative test. I'll keep you all posted

Rob

[mlbdude]

I completely agree pocketmoon. When looking for reviews for cards when I was trying to find a good solution all reviews barely touched on the TV output. I too was force to just try for myself. I tried old nVidia (440), new nVidia (5200), and various Radeon (128, 7500, and 9000). I found that what I saw was similar to what people were saying but not exact. I think a litle too much personal opinion gets in there

[insomniac]

And your favorite of the ones you tried was?

I.

Originally posted by mlbdude
I completely agree pocketmoon. When looking for reviews for cards when I was trying to find a good solution all reviews barely touched on the TV output. I too was force to just try for myself. I tried old nVidia (440), new nVidia (5200), and various Radeon (128, 7500, and 9000). I found that what I saw was similar to what people were saying but not exact. I think a litle too much personal opinion gets in there

[mlbdude]

Well, my favorite was the Radeon 9000. Though all of the newer ones do pretty well. I can't test them side by side but one after the other. For the money, the 9000 did the best. Plus with hardware decoding enabled I run about %18 CPU on a P3 1000 when watching Sage. But again this is my opinion

[pocketmoon]

Of course that's something else that's important especially with folks choicing platforms like mini-itx to base their pvt/htpc on.

18% on a PIII 1000 sounds great!

[sshapiro63]

For S-Video output I would say the FX 5200 is the best card. I have compared the S-Video output of both the FX 5200 and Radeon 9000 cards. The FX 5200 S-Video quality is much better in my opinion. In addition, the Nvidia drivers give very complete adjustments that allow the output to be scaled to fill the entire TV screen. The Radeon adjustments always leave a gap at the bottom of the TV display.

[mlbdude]

Yeah the CPU usage is nice I actually like the fact that the ATI drivers DO alow you to fill the entire screen. The FX 5200 is definately better than the old days but for me the extra $40 is not worth it. But then again, to me the 9000 looks better