Hello, i'm trying to get together a frontend and i'm looking for an inexpensive PCI card that has an onboard mpeg video decoder chip to decrease the cpu requirements. Its going to be hooked up to a tv so tv out would be a big help. I don't need a tv tuner so the pvr line is out. I searched but didn't find many suggestions aside from keeping away from ati cards.

I'm guessing if you're just using it for SD television, not high def, you can use pretty much any cheapo Nvidia card with Svideo out on it. The Nvidia cards do a pretty good job of handling most of the load.

The only PCI card I know of with hardware mpeg decoding and TV-out is the pvr-350. You can just not use the tuner part if you want.

But if this is going to be a frontend for a backend you already have then why not use the tuner also? The backend can manage the tuner in the frontend just fine.

The hollywood+ DVD decoder cards do this. They were also rebranded by Creative as the DXR3.

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Mephi
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R5.5
Opteron 2.Ghz
1Gb Ram, 200Gb Maxtor PATA
Avermedia 771 DVB-T
Hauppauge Nova-S2 (waiting to be installed)
MS MCE2 Remote

yes, but I don't think the dxr3's work with myth at least I know in the early days some people were trying to use them and having quite a few problems.

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

Xsecrets

The Hauppauge MediaMVP is essentially an MPEG2 hardware decoder in a very small, absolutely silent box. It can play back SD MPEG2 recordings found on a MythTV backend, but is not (and really can't be) a full MythTV frontend. The output is just like you'd get from a PVR-350, though:

http://www.knoppmythwiki.org/index.php? ... LinuxHOWTO

It's not a card, but it is a cheap (under $100 USD) way to go.