Experiences with Matrox G400 dual head

[zoso]

After doing some research on what would be best quality wise for S-Video out I ended up going with a Matrox G400 Dual Head. I noticed some others were talking about going with this card here so I figured that I would give you my experieces setting it up.

1. The TV out only works on display 2. My card did not come with a manual so I did not know this off the bat. Because of this the G400 does not officially support TV only display. This means that you have to at least configure it on a regular VGA monitor (install drivers and configure dual-head clone mode.) If using TV only you will not get video to your TV until Windows loads the video driver. At that point your video will come on.

2. I could not get mpeg display in a window with color set to 32 bit. Mpeg would display full screen using Matrox's DVDMax feature, but this is almost the same as dedicated mpeg decoder and you will not get any of the OSD of SageTV. Additionally, the remote control will not work. The only way to get out (or do anything) is Alt-F4 to close the window. The solution for viewing properly was to set the color to 24 bit.

There were a few others but they were kind of minor and my brain is a little to fried to remember specifics at this point. On a positive note, the display is leaps and bounds past what I was getting out of my MX400 or Radeon 8500. Definately worth the effort.

[trevorst]

I hve a G400 in one of my machines (non PVR) and it is a great card. For the PVR system I am using a Radeo 8500 with the component out dongle to a HDTV ready TV. This is by far the best picture and is better than the cable box going direct to the TV.

[videogeek]

You can download the manual from the web site (as well as the latest drivers).
Manual is not very usefull.
I have mine set to 32bit and 1024x768, TV clone mode, OSD of SageTV works in window or full screen mode - no problems. I have DVDMax not enabled.
My PVR-350 remote also works great

[zoso]

Which codec are you using for decoding? In default or overlay mode? Any of the codecs I tried had the same results, I would like to give the one your using a try.

Did you implement the registry tweaks for hardware acceleration? I couldn't find good information on whether the G400 supported hardware acceleration or not.

Do you have any issues with choppiness on pans? This may have been there before but just not noticable because of the poor image quality of the MX400.

[ChuckD]

I have a question. i have a pvr 350, and i am planning on buying a g400 strictly for playing dvd's with the dvdmax option. will i be able to have the dvd max option running at all times so i can just plug the matrox into a seperate input on my tv and just switch inputs when i play a dvd, or do i also need a monitor hooked up to use dvdmax?