Date: Tue, 11 Sep 2001 03:46:53 -0600 From: "Stephen Hurd" <deuce@lordlegacy.org> To: "R. Lahaye" <lahaye@users.sourceforge.net>, "FreeBSD" <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org> Subject: RE: Which TV card works with release 4.3 ? Message-ID: <NFBBJPHLGLNJEEECOCHAEELACCAA.deuce@lordlegacy.org> In-Reply-To: <3B9DCE0E.A49401BD@users.sourceforge.net>
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> My collegues tell me to abandon Unix/BSD/Linux on my PC when > wanting to use a TV card. I hope you will tell me otherwise. I've recently had a hankering to get my old ATI card with tv-out working in FreeBSD in the living room, and I can pass on some experience.... keep in mind that this is only with older ATI hardware. 1) nVidea (sp?) has written their own "Linux" drivers for their card... and that they work great for TV out. Points 2-3 wouldn't apply. It seems to me that unless they involved a kernel patch, they'd have to be included with X... and that would make them an X driver and probobly ported to FreeBSD. You'd have to ask someone else about that, I have no experience with it. Other HW manufacturers may have followed suit. Read the card-specific docs for X at: http://www.xfree86.org/support.html 2) There is no nice TV output control program... WinXX has a nice tool to adjust centering, gamma correction, and all kinds of other things, I've seen no reference of any tool to do this in ANY *nix. 3) The modelines are VERY important here... my ATI card will automatically enable TV-out when a TV is connected at boot, and this works great for the console. If you want to run X (and I'm sure you do) you have to actually understand both what the numbers in the modeline means, and PAL or NTSC (whichever appropriate for you) and do a bunch of calculations to get the correct modeline... I'm still giving my calculator a workout... I don't quite have it yet, but I'm getting closer... and have pretty much given up. A search of the internet goves modelines for PAL output, but I'm stuck here in Canada with NTSC... 4) In my experience, DVD, other MPEG, AVI, Realvideo, etc... the main reason most people want to use TV-out... is better in Windows... the other big reason (games) are much better in windows. If you want, you can whip up a personalised GUI using perl and Tk to launch all your desired programs and load that instead of explorer in a base Win95 system to kill alot of the overhead... this is what I ended up doing on my system for the time being. To sum up, I personally agree with your friends. Although FreeBSD or Linux could probobly do it, Windows software is plain better at entertainment-based multi-media. Not to bash FreeBSD or Linux or Solaris or any other OS, but Windows plays to the home users, and the home users are the only people who really USE TV-out. You will be using it faster and with less problems in Windows than any other OS I've used. However, if you like to do it the hard way... be it for a sense of accomplishment, the coolness brag factor, a lack of an extra $150 to buy another copy of Windows, a deep-rooted desire to prove me wrong, etc... it CAN be done... just don't go with older hardware. ;-) "Does reading in the bathroom count as multi-tasking?" To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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