Suggestions for TV-Out PVR-350 vs. Graphics card

[silentbob]

I'm currently running gb-pvr on a P4 2.0Ghz machine with a PVR-350 TV card. It all works very nicely and I've had it running since January without any problems.

The only draw-back with the current setup is that I can't play MPEG-4 (DivX / Xvid) videos via the PVR-350's TV-Out. I'm currently setting up a media server on my network where I want to store all of my films and stream them (via the WLAN) to my gb-pvr machine to play. At the moment I have a stand-alone DVD / DivX player, but it would be nice if I could use my "Tivo" PC to replace this (and use the huge amount of storage available there!)

I guess this requires that I buy a graphics card with a TV-Out function, but I have a couple of questions:

(a) Can anyone recommend an acceptable graphics card (AGP) for not too much money since I *only* use this machine for watching TV / media and not playing games (I intend to still use the pvr-350 for watching TV).
(b) Will gb-pvr cope with playing the TV (& recordings) via the TV-Out of the PVR-350 and only use the graphics card for MPEG-4 playback?

Cheers for any comments :-)

[stefan]

(b) Will gb-pvr cope with playing the TV (& recordings) via the TV-Out of the PVR-350 and only use the graphics card for MPEG-4 playback?

No, it won't. I'd like this, too, but for now we'll have to do with switching to windows desktop (i use, which I assume you will, too, two separate inputs on my tv for the 350 and the graphics card, respectively), and start the thing we want to watch in another player of choice. Another option would be to go into setup of gbpvr and temporarily switch off harware encoding and restart, but that's too much of a hassle :-)

[Michael]

What I find to be best for me personally are the Nvidia 6600 series cards. gigabyte make some silent pipe passive cooled cards on 6600GT for AGP. If you get the nvidia dvd decoder then you can make full use of the Video Processor on the card. The 6600 also does the WMV9 acceleration as well . The card has TV Out but I am looking to drive a large 32-37" LCD TV via DVI.

Only downside is the price of £140 for the cards. The plus side is that the card is HDTV output capable.

[rosco99]

ATI Radeon 9550 has DVI, has heat sink instead of fan and has adequate resources for HDTV. I have the 128mg memory on board. It is reasonable in price.

[daphatty]

I also bought the ATI Radeon 7000 for ~$40 US. I was originally using a Radeon 9600 but have since returned it to its proper location, my gaming rig. I have noticed a difference in video playback quality but changing the MPEG decoder seemed to resolve that for the most part. If you are looking to go cheap (and quiet) the 7000 is a sure bet. Otherwise, I'd go for a 9000 or a 9200 series Radeon.