On Wed, 2006-05-31 at 13:38 +0300, Niko Mikkila wrote: > On Wed, 31 May 2006 09:47:56 +0300 > Marko M?kel? <marko.makela@xxxxxx> wrote: > > > > > I'd say that -P"softdevice -vo:mgatv" (on a G450) is less hassle than > > -Pdxr3. Because my dxr3 broke only after a couple of months of usage and > > I've been using softdevice for almost 1.5 years now, I may be biased. > > Softdevice has gotten a lot more stable during that time. > > Yeah, Dxr3 installation has its own twists and turns. It's a good thing > the driver and the plugin are under active development and they are > actually quite stable (for me). FF cards are easy. Not sure if this is useful to anyone, but I'll share my experience anyway: I have a DXR3, FF card, budget card and a passively cooled Radeon 9200 in my dedicated VDR box, and a G450 in the closet. I've had this setup for about 2 years (apart from the FF card which I got half a year ago), and the system is practically speaking running 24/7, no watchdogs involved. DXR3 is the primary output device, using SPDIF for audio and S-Video for video for now, soon migrating to component video using the cable available from Sigma Designs' online shop. The only tedious thing about the setup was to find the correct parameters for the kernel module, but I don't think I spent much more than 10 minutes with it (and that was about 2 years ago). I haven't even tried the FF card's output due to problems in getting digital audio + non-composite video out of it simultaneously. Even though the card has the J2, seems that the adapters that do both are hard to find nowadays (well, or at least they were when I got the card). And I'm not a hardware hacker myself. The Radeon 9200 and its TV-out is there for the sole purpose of watching boot/POST messages or troubleshooting, both of which are extremely rarely needed. The G450 is in the closet because I'm a fan of hardware decoded audio/video which helps keep the system cool and silent, and I was turned off by reading some TV-out setup docs for the G450 (looked complicated to (lazy) me, and I didn't find anything about getting everything right from the BIOS messages to go to the TV-out (the Radeon does that just by plugging in the cable)). So I haven't bothered to really even try it out. Works for me :)
