[MPlayer-users] Need suggestions for Video Card & Sound Card

[Dan]

Ahsan A. wrote:

>[Automatic answer: RTFM (read DOCS, FAQ), also read DOCS/bugreports.html]
>Hi,
>
>I'm about to purchase a new PC, for which I would like to have
>suggestions on which Video Card & Sound Card is the BEST for playing
>movies in mplayer.
>
>My config will be Pentium 4  (1.8 Ghz), with 500 (or 1 GB) Ram.
>
>Please note that watching DivX / Mpeg / VCD movies is the only reason
>I'  need a good card.
>
>And I'll be using Red Hat 8.0
>
>Best Regards, Ahsan
>
As an owner of an ATI Radeon 64MB DDR, I have to advise *extreme* 
caution to those considering buying one.
Reasons:
- TV-out support has been removed from the Gatos project, and not return.
- Access to documentation for the newer Rage Theatre chips ( in Radeons 
released in the past year ) is being refused by ATI.
- DRI developers have access to only a limited subset of the Radeon's 3D 
'stuff' ( the technical term, I believe ). Anyway you say you don't want 
3D stuff...

If you can handle _not_ having TV-out support in X, and _not_ using the 
Rage Theatre chip ( no capture, xv or tuner support ) then you can get 
TV-out working on the console. Yay. I suppose if you only use mplayer 
then not having tv-out under X isn't such a disaster - the DirectFB 
driver works quite well. Or maybe if you've got some time you can either 
compile the old XFree86-4.1.0 ( I think ) with the ( very ) old devel 
branch of Gatos that still supports tv-out, or update the devel branch 
to work with XFree86-4.3.0 ( someone please do this ).

I've heard people bitch about nVidia's drivers being buggy with respect 
to xv support, but honestly, it works fine on my system ( with my best 
friend's Geforce 2 MX ) as far as I can tell, and at least nVidia seem 
to be putting some serious effort into their drivers.

I would ( and will next time... ) buy an nVidia with an S-Video 
connector. If you don't want 3D acceleration at all, you might be able 
to pick up a TNT with tv-out *really* cheap. Alternatively, you should 
check around for an nVidia which supports running your desktop at 
1024x768 and outputting to the TV at the same time. The older cards ( ie 
the GeForce 2 MX ) won't do this. A GeForce 4 MX most likely will - and 
they're dirt cheap now too. Check the docs ( the nVidia web site's a 
good place to start if you're interested ) for details.

Maybe a Matrox might be a good option also. Matrox have been nice to 
Linux with respect to access to documentation. I haven't used one 
myself, but I've heard nice things about them...

As for the sound side of it, I'd say an SB Live 5.1 should do nicely. 
Maybe others will recommend an Audigy. I'm not sure if you're going to 
notice the difference between an SB Live 5.1 and an Audigy, especially 
under Linux.

Dan