After my update last night I tried the specific steps that I had identified as my “last try” to get my video card working. They failed. As decided I was going to give up and buy an NVidia card, however I was just looking through the BIOS settings to see whether there was anything obvious that might be relevant. (Yes that is a staw I’m clutching in my pudgy little paw) Some settings in there reminded me that my motherboard has a built-in graphics card, an NVidia one. It was just a question of unplugging the ATI card, changing a BIOS setting and rebooting.
Worked first time.
First bloody time.
Tested it with Myth and live TV playback is smooth. Not only was the aspect ratio correct but it actually detected the resolution of my LCD TV automatically.
Now the onboard video card isn’t as fancy as the one I removed. In particular
- it only has a VGA connection – the other one had DVI (with VGA adapter) and S-Video. But my TV has a VGA in so that’s no problem.
- it only has one screen – the other one is dual. This has come in slightly useful as I can connect to my TV and a monitor. So that if/when it generates a resolution/refresh rate the TV can’t handle the monitor can. But this is a minor point. If I need to debug a problem with a different video mode, I can just plug in the monitor.
- it uses main memory for its video memory. That’s ok, I’m probably over-spec’d for memory anyway.
In general the on-board card doesn’t have as much ‘oomph’ as the ATI one but that’s still more than enough for watch TV. Maybe if I was using HD it might need it – but I’m not.
My experience generally with Myth is that you don’t need as highly spec’d a box as all that. My old machine would probably have been fine and that was 5 years old. Buying a new machine has primarily got me a bigger hard disk and quieter machine. The processor doesn’t break a sweat and I rarely use all the 2Gb memory.
So now I’m thinking I’ll sell the ATI card on ebay. It’ll be perfect for some gamer on Windows.