[mythtvnz] silent cards

[Aaron Whitehouse]

AlanP wrote:
> At 02:29 p.m. 19/03/2009, you wrote:
>> I know everyone seems to prefer NVidia for front ends, but I see this ATI
>> card is pretty well specced, and the price is about $125++
> I'm not buying ATI again for media PC purposes. The price isn't worth it.

I'm using an AMD 780G chipset with Radeon 3200 on board (HDMI, S/PDIF
etc. etc.).  Mythbuntu 8.10 doesn't come with Xv support in the Free
drivers, but the recent releases of both the radeon and radeonhd drivers
do.  The non-Free drivers have treated me well, but they probably aren't
as good as the non-Free nVidia drivers.

For me, I wanted to support ATi because they are supporting Free
drivers, even if I (unlike RMS) choose to use non-Free drivers where the
system wouldn't do what I need it to without.  Very shortly, the Free
drivers for ATi cards will be leagues ahead of the Free drivers for
nVidia. Free drivers and open specs are important to me, so I buy ATi.
They should be important to you, as well.  My one caveat is that the
spec for the UVD stuff hasn't been openly released yet, but that is
still miles ahead of nVidia.

On the other hand, I understand that UVD support for ATi on Gnu/Linux
isn't far away and I have heard that, for my card at least, its UVD is
better than nVidia's PureVideo.

The 780G is a very impressive integrated chipset at a very good price,
but it isn't for you if you need to off-load video decoding.

Regards,

Aaron