TV Out HELP!!!!

[lwilshire]

I am gonna be making a HTPC setup soon using my existing computer setup (when i get round to the upgrade). I thought i had it all planned out but when i started reading these forums i came across the problem of the TV Out. My intended setup was this:

Athlon Tbird 1.2GHz
Zalman Flower Cooler
896Mb PC133 RAM
60Gig IBM HDD
GeForce 2 Pro
The really cool HTPC case from quietPC.com

For TV Recording i was thinking of a Hauppauge PVR250 and i was thinking of using my existing Hauppauge TV card (non PVR) for Live TV (don't know if that is possible with sage please tell me if its not)

I would be using this on a pc connected only to a tv (no monitor) but i had completely forgot my graphics card hasn't got a tv out (i was thinking of my old Voodoo Banshee waaaaay back!) i didn't think this was too much of a problem because i could just put a 350 card in instead for another £30 or so but i've been reading about the problems with the TV out on the 350 and i have a few questions:

I know it doesn't show menus now but will in sage 2 which is expected in the summer, correct?

if i have the two card setup as above will i be able to show the live tv from the non PVR hauppauge card (provided that works) on the tv through the 350 card?

instead of using a 350 card would i be better off trying to get a new graphics card with a tv out? if so any suggestions? (I know how much of a debated issue this is and it seems a matrox G400 Max would be good and cheap at £20 but i can't find them with cables anywhere in the UK)

go on shatter my dreams....

[ErsatzTom]

You are correct that V2 will support all of the interface on the 350 tv out and the beta (available to everyone who owns a SageTV license) is expected within a couple of weeks. However, keep in mind that while the entire Sage experience will be available to you through the tv, you will not be able to get to the windows desktop or other applications unless they specifically support the 350 tv out. If that isn't a problem for you, the PQ is supposed to be great with these cards.

t

[GbrNole]

for tv out the geforce fx5200 cards offer a great picture for a good price and with the next nvdvd (3.0) being released soon nvidia may very well put a big dent into ati being the preferred card for htpc.

saying that though i use a radeon 9500pro which had decent tv out but i'm now connected by dvi and HOLY MOLY!!!!

ps. you can't use your non 250/350 capture card with sage.

[mlbdude]

I just threw in a 5200 in place of my 9600 to check it out. I have to say I definitely find the Radeon to give better output. Even my 9000 that I got for $40 gives better output than the 5200.

The 5200 is not bad though. I would not bother replacing it if I started with it, but if given the choice I would stick with the Radeon 9000+ line.

I do like the nVidia drivers a bit better though.

[gplasky]

I use a GeForce FX 5200 to the front room HDTV. And luckily my tv has a VGA input. Couple (3) of reasons I went with this card (by the way excellent picture at 1280 x 720)
1. Integrated TV Encoder
Provides best-of-class TV-out functionality for resolutions up to 1024x768
2.Integrated Full Hardware MPEG-2 Decoder
Delivers full-frame, full-screen MPEG-2 video on your desktop.
3. 64-phase Video Scaler
Highest quality for scaling DVD and other video to full-screen HDTV resolutions.

Strictly went with this card for the Home Theater experience. No real high-end gaming on this machine. Matter of fact I just went with a new GeForce FX5700 for my other machine. Sweet picture on 19"PC monitor. Not much difference between VMR9 and overlay.

Gerry

[mlbdude]

1. Integrated TV Encoder
Provides best-of-class TV-out functionality for resolutions up to 1024x768
2.Integrated Full Hardware MPEG-2 Decoder
Delivers full-frame, full-screen MPEG-2 video on your desktop.
3. 64-phase Video Scaler
Highest quality for scaling DVD and other video to full-screen HDTV resolutions.

Did you pull that directly off the box? Yeah all cards say that stuff these days. I would bet it would look real good using VGA or DVI. I am jealous .

[GbrNole]

i can tell you that my 9500 via dvi is the shiznit!!

have sage playing recordings back at 1920x540p and dvd's playing back at 1920x1080i - not high def but it's very, very good.

[jptaz]

Originally posted by gplasky
I use a GeForce FX 5200 to the front room HDTV. And luckily my tv has a VGA input. Couple (3) of reasons I went with this card (by the way excellent picture at 1280 x 720)
1. Integrated TV Encoder
Provides best-of-class TV-out functionality for resolutions up to 1024x768
2.Integrated Full Hardware MPEG-2 Decoder
Delivers full-frame, full-screen MPEG-2 video on your desktop.
3. 64-phase Video Scaler
Highest quality for scaling DVD and other video to full-screen HDTV resolutions.

Strictly went with this card for the Home Theater experience. No real high-end gaming on this machine. Matter of fact I just went with a new GeForce FX5700 for my other machine. Sweet picture on 19"PC monitor. Not much difference between VMR9 and overlay.

Gerry

2. Gerry this is not true at all. I have mine on P3 733Mhz and it uses 60% to 90% where as my true Full hardware MPEG-2 decoder on my XCard ran at 1% CPU which was mostly IO.

I love my 5200 for the S-Video out to my old 25" Sony TV, but it is far from true hardware MPEG-2 decoding. I even used the NV DVD so it wasn't the software.

John

[GbrNole]

jptaz, it doesn't sound like you have dxva enabled if your cpu usage is that high or alternatively you're using vmr instead of overlay.

dxva should result in less than 50% cpu usage even for that chip.

[jptaz]

DXVA is enabled and I use Overlay since VMR is painfully slow.

Trust me without DXVA on a 733Mhz P3 MPEG 2 is not watchable.
When I tired a whole Bunch of MPEG2 Decoders if the DXVA was not enabled it was so slow.

It works fine, just uses high CPU.

It is less than 50% on DVDs, but the PVR 250 Streams are not very optimized so it is higher trying to deal with the stream.

John

[mlbdude]

Yeah none of the current nVidia's or ATI's have "Full" MPEG2 hardware decoding. They all have assist. On my P3 1000 with DXVA on I get around 20-30% CPU. On my XP2500 I get around 10-20% CPU. Both good numbers. They are about the same between the nVidia and ATI.

VMR is bad for me too. Maybe VMR9 is better than the VMR7 Sage uses.

[jptaz]

Nope VMR9 is not better.

SnapStream uses VM9 and it is unwatchable on my P3 unless you use the low quality 480 x 480 crap that they use and even that is painful.

[gplasky]

OK-I'll jump back in.
Yeah-I pulled that blurb stuff off of their website. It doesn' seem that nVidia publishes alot of detail specs on their cards. My other drawback is everybody and their brother tests a video card....for game performance. I can't find one website testing for video playback or other things that are more relevant for HTPC use. I'm not a sucker here and I weighed this card against other cards in the same budget area. My thoughts were this:
1. The integrated TV-encoder on this card (this isn't a tuner card so I was impressed it had this) will out put in harware to 1024 x 768. This means to mean on my PC that is my resolutoin so I'm not taxing the card much at all. If I output to my HDTC at 1280 x 720 the card would scale but would only have to scale from 1024 x 768. Again less impact on the card.
2. I knew it wasn't a full-blown mpeg2 decoder and figured it was more like hardware-assist. But when I play a DVD cpu is between 5-11% with peaks up to 16%. I played back a record Sage file recorded at 2GB. Again cpu 5-10% with a couple 13% peaks. These were all playing back at full screen. Oh yeah-VMR9 too.
I'm impressed with what the card can do. And seeing I was coming from an old ATI AIW 8500DV with 64MB, this card blows it away. I'm not expecting miracles with this card but I am impressed with the CPU% when playing SageTV recorded files, and DVD. I might dig out my T2 special DVD with the MS HD-DVD stuff on it and see how it handles that.

Gerry

EDIT: That was with the NVDVD player. With WinDVD 5 overlay was 5-11% and VMR9 was 16-22% with peaks of 34%.

[mikejaner]

Bottom line....

You have a standard TV, so your best picture quality will come from a PVR 350. As long as your willing to sacrifice DVD playback and music visualizations, which I think will change. Rumor has it DVD playback is achievable through some tricks with Graphedit, and simple visualizations could be done with the OSD.

mikejaner

[jptaz]

Gerry,

I tend to agree. I did not mean to knock your statements. I had a AIW 7500 and I agree the 5200 is much better for my standard TV. It is not as good as my XCard, but close enough for me to want the SageTV OSD. I may consider the PVR 350 once 2.0 is out but for now it works really well for me. I have no experience with the Radeon 9000 serries, but my biggest issue with ATI 7500 was the lack of true 720 x 480 overscan output. On my TV the screen was not filled and it was skewed. Others may not have this issue, but my Sony 25" did.

Just my thoughts.

John

[gplasky]

I'm interested in the XCard integration too. Seems like a sweet way to go. But I'm pretty happy with what I have now so I can wait until they get that integration worked out completely before I even have to think about it.
Mike-you are correct for my front room server connected to the HDTV. However my 2nd PC is my Sage Client connected to a 19"PC monitor at 1024 x 768.

[lwilshire]

Originally posted by mikejaner


Rumor has it DVD playback is achievable through some tricks with Graphedit, and simple visualizations could be done with the OSD.

mike how likely is the dvd and visualistations rumour any links maybe?

i hadn't really thought about them before but visuals like on WMP would be nice, are they ever likely to be possible with the OSD or are we talking something simpler? - i guess it depends how the OSD is generated

[justme]

mike how likely is the dvd and visualistations rumour any links maybe?

From my personal experience getting video out isn't that hard. If you rip(remove CSS) the DVD and Demux the correct streams. You can save the whole thing to one Vob and rename it to an mpeg. The issue is that the audio is usaully AC3 and that requires reencoding to be playable on the 350's output. This is what kills it for me. I can rip a DVD in about 17 minutes and that I can live with that. It's reencoding the audio to mp3 and then muxing it into the newly made mpeg that takes too long. I have yet to find a ripper that will do the mp3 transcoding and remuxing while ripping. If someone could find that then the 350 would be fine for DVD playback, as long as the delay was not much longer than a normal rip. I used DVD Decrypter for ripping and Besweet for audio reecoding. I then remux the two with TMPGenc.

All of this to watch a DVD I own. I've decided to just use my xbox for DVD playback for now. I may end up buying an Xcard just so I can finally have an all in one solution. But even then I would still need to use 2 AV inputs(or a electronic autoswitcher) since Sage2 won't have OSD for the Xcard. Maybe a future version of Sage2+ will, if so I'd definitely buy an Xcard. It's a very depressing(not Frey's fault) thing for those of us with only SVHS capable TVs. You guys with VGA/DVI inputs have no idea how lucky you are.

I know Frey probably wouldn't want too much conversation about this on their forums, and rightfully so. But for those who wish to find a way to do this for fair use(I didn't say legal since the DMCA makes that impossible) maybe someone could put together a site, forum. At the very least maybe there could be a thread on Doom9. I know there will always be people who will abuse such knowledge but that's no reason to punish the people who just want to watch a DVD, not steal it.

[stanger89]

Gerry, the TV encoder is for the TV out (S-Video), it has nothing to do with performance, and still outputs at 480i, 1024x768 just means that is the highest resolution it can convert to 480i, it's just an integrated scan converter. If you've got an HDTV they you'd get a much better picture if you use a DVI, VGA, or Component connection.

What's your TV.

[gplasky]

Gotcha-thought it might of helped on any out. Here's my TV:
Panasonic PT-40LC12

And I do have it connected to the VGA in and it is a very sweet picture. No complaints with the FX 5200 on it. Overscan is perfect. Fonts and the Windows desktop more than readable from 8 ft. away.

So being I can output to VGA in on the TV would a solution like the X card really buy me anything other than maybe slighter lower cpu usage.

Gerry