[mythtvnz] HDMI video cards

[Stephen Worthington]

On Wed, 24 Mar 2010 08:05:43 +1300, you wrote:

>Question is, what would a video card with HDMI output display during 
>boot, and what resolution is it?

I have two MythTV boxes (mine and my mothers).  Mine has a motherboard
with an old Nvidia 6100 GPU builtin, and a new PCIex16 Nvidia 8400GS
card with DVI-I output connected via DVI->HDMI cable.  My mother's has
on motherboard 8400GS and an HDMI output.

To get the BIOS to display on the HDMI port or DVI->HDMI port, I have
to make sure that the video card is set up as defaulting to PCIe in
the BIOS and it is set as the primary video card.  And that the HDMI
or DVI->HDMI cable is actually plugged in at boot time.  Otherwise
they both choose to display the BIOS and grub2 screens on a different
output.  Once the PC has booted, Linux takes over and the X screen
will likely be able to be displayed on whatever card or output you
like.  But the consoles (Ctrl-Alt-F1 and so on) will still be on
whatever output the BIOS was using, so if you want to use them, you
need to get the BIOS to display at boot.

Also, look out for kernels that have broken console support.  There
have been several released as normal updates in the life of my MythTV
box.  These display blank consoles or strange unlocked or coloured
(and unreadable) video.  The X output still works.