I know this is the point of KRP, but I don't want to wait and would like to hear many opinions. I have tried to hack together a system, and it's just not fast enough.

I have an Athlon64 3200, 512mb ram, PCHDTV-3000, and an Nvidia FX5200 (rosewill, I think).

What needs to be upgraded? I'm most interested in hearing what "the" video card to get is.

well I'm really surprised that your system is not fast enough. I could have sworn I heard people with A64 3200's having good luck with hdtv. As for the video card in my mine you have "the" video card, cause they are cheap and generally fanless. I have a PIV 3.0 with the same vid card and same ram and it's more than enough. Have you tried using libmpeg for playback? and what are your symptoms of not being fast enough?

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Have a question search the forum and have a look at the KnoppMythWiki.

Xsecrets

Thanks for the quick reply. I'm reinstalling once again, so I'll be more specific once I'm in Myth. I'm pretty sure I was using libmpeg. It was basically a bit choppy. With an ATI card it was really choppy, once I got the Nvidia one in with the right drivers it was only slightly choppy. You'd notice it mostly on a smooth pan.

Is there a more expensive card than the 5200 that would perform better, or is that not likely to be the bottleneck? If I remember correctly, top reported that CPU was at 50% or so, maybe 70% at most. I forgot to mention that fans aren't an issue, as the box sits in an isolated server room.

Ty

What output device are you using? Perhaps you haven't optimized the X configuration for that?

I spent time tweaking my system to no end to deal with a tearing issue. Various X/nvidia acceleration options were put in place, as were various vertical sync options.

I think the final solution was to change my vertical refresh rate from 75Hz to 60Hz. Yes the projector can sync up to 100Hz, but the colorwheel itself is fixed speed, which means it has an inherent physical refresh rate (the 'native' refresh rate).

Some more testing tonight when I don't have light leaking into the room to verify the tearing is gone once and for all.

-brendan

PS - my system has almost identical specs...

Choppiness during panning can also be due to deinterlacing issues. It will be most noticeable on "live" shows like news and sports, rather than "filmed" shows. Check your deinterlacing settings, particularly if you're watching 1080i channels on a 720p display.

I get issues when trying to watch HDTV and what I put it down to is signal strength as my Hardware is more than capable.

I too can vouch for the interlacing thing, as I love my sport and it looks kind of funny.

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Girkers

That's pretty much the hardware I'm in the process of aquiring for my upgraded "KnoppMyth with HDTV" box... I don't know if a faster processor would help given that it's not maxed out.

Pardon me if I'm being redundant but without the prior context... Have you tried using the nvidia-settings program to set all the "sync to vblank" options on? (I seem to remember that there's about four of them...) Do you have the Xv stuff enabled? ...

It works now, thanks to a fresh install with nvidia drivers. Having the correct modeline seems very important too.

Ty