[Kat Manton]

Originally Posted by Jarl Ayari

That is amazing work and results.

Thanks - it's also good fun, though several friends now think I've 'lost it' completely... "You're trying to get *what* out of a PC?!?"

I wonder if it would work on diffrent chipsets like ATI for example.

That depends entirely on the range of possible dot-clocks available; I think there is an ATI card which will run down to 8MHz, which might be more appropriate, but I'm not sure how small the 'steps' in dot-clock are. I'd have to get one and play with it, I think. I suspect it'd need a completely new modeline calculating after determining the specification of the card.

I would pretty much imagine that anything higher than the GForce etc would handle the regular NVIDIA commands as they all use the same driver pack, and the higher cards just seem to add features rather than take them away.

I'm pretty sure about that myself; I have a lot of generic documentation for nVidia cards here and it looks like GeForce4 and higher-spec cards should work with the modeline I've calculated above.

It would also be economical if this were to work to be able to build/scrounge a whole pc of a uitable standard to do this at little to no cost, in fact several machines that I think would have done this have been available on freecycle recently.

The MythTV system is set up assuming it's the sole system running 24/7 on a dedicated PC; you don't need a keyboard or mouse on it as it's controlled through an IR remote, and it retrieves programme guide information during early morning - so it's best to dedicate a PC to this and leave it going.
My experimental system is a 600MHz Pentium III system I was given, it currently has a 40G hard disk and 256M RAM. With the addition of the GeForce4 card off eBay I've spent less than £20 on it. I still need to add a digital terrestrial card (around £35 off eBay - must be a Hauppauge Nova-T as this is well-supported) I'm currently using a very basic 'frame-grabber' analogue terrestrial card which is less than satisfactory; the machine hasn't enough processing power to encode captured video, buffer it to disk, then decode it in real-time at a decent resolution (it does this as it's possible to pause and rewind live tv etc) But, the DVB-T card produces an mpeg stream so no encoding is necessary, meaning the system is more than powerful enough as it only then has to buffer to disk and decode/display - and the GPU on the GeForce4 card does a lot of the hard work.

You deserve a few for all this work and even tho many have said it, keep it up

heh, thanks I'm not stopping now; this is looking too promising... I can't wait to see it running - and I've not even got a 405-line TV to try it with yet I think I understand what my friends were thinking...

Regards, Kat