Now that we have a HDTV unit and MythTV, it occured to me that there had to be a better way to get video to the HDTV than the standard S-Video cable I’d been using. And sure enough, there is.
Our TV has a HDMI input, which is pin-compatible with a digital DVI output on standard PC video cards. Slick. So, with the aid of a Gefen DVI to HDMI cable and a Radeon 9600 card stolen from my main PC, I got a pure digital picture on the TV. Wow. It’s nice. Beats S-Video cables handily.
Moreover, the TV supports EDID, the technology that lets PC monitors tell the PC what video modes they support. My TV reported 1920×540, 720×480, and 640×480 modes. Again, nice. And the ATI fglrx driver reports all the information you need to generate the appropriate ModeLine for it. Even slicker.
I’m going to buy a Radeon 9200 card for the MythTV unit so I can get the 9600 back for my desktop.
The only problem: the display is now so sharp that MPEG compression artifacts are more noticable and annoying than before. Guess I’ll have to bump up my bitrates in MythTV. Sigh.
Here are some links I found useful:
You can get DVI to HDMI cables much cheaper at:
http://store.pchcables.com/hdcahdemuin.html
They are a store that is local to me.