On Mon, 2003-08-04 at 09:31, Tim Halle wrote: > Greetings: > I am in the process of building an open source media center and woundered if any of you had a recommendation for a good, linux supported, output card that does NTSC. PCI would be better than AGP as I am trying to fit this into a particular motherboard, but can probably live with AGP if I have to. Probably any graphics card with a TV-out would do. But... If you really want good image quality, consider a DXR3 card. It's a hardware MPEG1/2 decoder, hence it can play directly only MPEG1/2 streams (VCD, SVCD, DVD). However, if your media player supports DXR3 (i know Xine does), then you may be able to play any arbitrary format to the DXR3, because the player will do the conversion on the fly. A normal TV-out card will output NTSC signal, but the video will be mapped onto it awkwardly - there's no guarantee for matching the scanlines and/or the frames. While the DXR3 matches the video stream and the NTSC output perfectly, scanline for scanline, frame for frame (or field for field). The quality difference is signifficant. You can even find Linux drivers for the DXR3. Normally, you should be able to get a DXR3 for like 25$ off of eBay. -- Florin Andrei http://florin.myip.org/
