While the initial installation of KnoppMyth was dead simple and basically worked out of the box. For that I have to send a big thank you and many kudos' to the people that put this great package together. Since then I have been dealing with is my learning curve on the Digital Video world and possibly some hardware problems. I have a PVR 350 for recording and I thought for play back too. It's connected to a 22" Sony WEGA TV that for what ever reason doesn't have a Svideo input. Seems you have to buy the 24" for that. Didn't know that when I bought it. Thus, i'm using the composit inputs for video and sound. The PVR plays back crisp, clear and without any jitter. But as I found out there's real problems when you use this setup for playing DVD's. There's a number of posts that I have found that make it seem that playing DVD's in this situation is impossible.

With that in mind I purchased a 64meg eVGA nvidia GeForce MX 4000 and put that in the system. Again following the knoppmyth instructions it was very easy to set up however I ran in to this problem. The picture on the TV from this card is very poor. As soon as the penguin root screen comes up you can tell somethings wrong. The Screen is full of wavy lines at 45% and the image is definatly of a lower quailty then the PVR 350. I have made sure the the Interlace options are disabled and tried various resolutions. Nothing seems to change the fact that the picture is smeared and poor.

I'm back to the PVR 350 using the same cables as I was using on the nVidia so I don't think it's the cables. It's the Same TV so I'm wondering do I just write off this card as a bad investment or is there something I'm missing in configuring this card when connecting it to the TV.

Does the eVGA card have a composite video output on it or are you using an S-video to composite adapter?

If you are using an adapter, did it come with the card?

I'm using a Svideo to Compsite adapter that I purchased as there was none supplied with the card. I can use the Cable and adapter combination with the PVR 350's Svideo out and it's just as clear as using the Composite from the PVR350. Are their different kinds of these adpaters?

I thought I had read somewhere that a video card had to specifially be designed to use these adapaters. After you replied I looked around on the Internet for some mention of this and couldn't find anything so I guess I am mistaken.

On both my MX4000 cards, text mode during boot worked on my TV before I even installed KnoppMyth. On one of my systems, the output runs through an Svideo to composite adapter, through an RCA cable to the input of a VCR, and then out on channel 3 to a 20" TV. The picture is fine.

My only guess then is that your video card is defective. Did you try hooking it up to a monitor and see what it looks like?

One more thing to try, with R5A12 I type this at the initial splash screen when I am installing:

knoppmyth alsa screen="640x480" vga=normal vsync=60

Maybe try booting off the CD and typing this at the splashscreen and see if you get the same interference you are seeing now.

When you switched back to the PVR-350, did you remove the eVGA card? Could it be that the card is producing some sort of RF interference that is preventing the PVR-350 from capturing properly? I guess you should know by looking at the menus (not effected by capture quality) or playing back a recording made before you installed the eVGA card.

Also look at my thread about using bob deinterlace for svideo output http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=3658. The PVR-350 outputs the interlaced fields perfectly which is why many people rave about it's output.

One thing you could try. When I used a svideo to composite adapter on my old nvidia card, tv came out poor and black and white. It you go into the /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 and change "SVIDEO" to "COMPOSITE" in the Monitor section (I think), it should fix your problem. It worked for me.

When I swithched to a Svideo cable (no adatper) I had to change the setting back to "SVIDEO".

Hope that helps.

_________________
SIS K7S5A mb R4V5
Amd 2000 + cpu Atheros chipset wireless NIC
GF4 ti4200 Video onboard ALSA sound card
768 meg sdram partial install on Nuv2disc
120 g maxtor HD
PVR 250 Video Capture card

Well from the very start this is my Configuration parms for the X11Server. I have tried both SVIDEO and Composite.

Section "Device"
Identifier "TV"
Driver "nvidia"
Option "ConnectedMonitor" "TV"
Option "NoLogo" "yes"
Option "TVStandard" "NTSC-M"
Option "TVOverscan" "0.9"
Option "IgnoreEDID" "1"
Option "UseEdidFreqs" "0"
# Option "TVOutFormat" "SVIDEO"
Option "TVOutFormat" "COMPOSITE"
Option "hw cursor" "off"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
Identifier "TV"
Option "DPMS"
HorizSync 30-50
VertRefresh 60
ModeLine "640x480" 25.175 640 664 760 800 480 491 493 525 #60Hz
ModeLine "800x600" 40.12 800 848 968 1056 600 601 605 628 #60Hz
EndSection