[ILUG] TV-Out Video card

[Liam Bedford]

Gavin McCullagh wrote:

>Hi,
>  
>
>Nvidia:
>* I know they have TV Out, but I'd rather have one with good OSS drivers,
>not to mention buy from a company who helps out OSS with specs etc.
>
>ATI:
>* Most of their TV Out cards have patent problems so they cannot open
>source them, if there's one around though I'd love to know.  I read
>somewhere that their newer ones are free of this.
>
>Matrox:
>* I gather this might be a good place to look.  I think I've seen talk of
>matrox TV Out in linux.
>
>I actually have an ATI All-In-Wonder Rage 128 in my Dad's machine which has
>the Macrovision patent issues.  So, if anyone has a good model that's known
>to work well, I'd love to hear about it.
>
>  
>
I'm just going to add a bit obout the Open Sourceness of the various cards:
Nvidia seem to have completely given up at this point. There's no option 
apart from the nvidia drivers if you want advanced features like 3D. Grr.

ATI have also given it up, as of the 300 series (IIRC) processors. So 
everything from the 9500 upwards requires closed source drivers for 3D etc.

Matrox had some funny things with HALs etc.. but I haven't used/looked 
into them much.

If you don't care about 3D speed, you could look for the radeon 8500 
series, I think they're supported properly. Maybe even the 9000, but I 
haven't really looked into TV out properly on this machine.

L.