Help picking a video card and other related gear

[Dieter]

> > That's for 60 Hz. If you think you might want a 120 Hz display
> > instead of 60 Hz, dual link is only good for 1920x1200.
> 
> Ok, I really should tune this CRT from 85Hz down to 60Hz and see
> if it drives me nuts. As well as check out other peoples LCD settings
> in person to be sure. Right now, it's real estate I need most.

The refresh/flicker issue is different for LCDs than it is for CRTs.
Most LCDs are 60 Hz and don't flicker like CRTs do.  For "desktop"
type work this should be great.  For watching TV this creates a
problem due to the eye's persistence-of-vision.  Solution seems
to be to add flicker to reduce ghosting.  Basically emulating the CRT
phosphor.  Which I suspect means we'll want faster refresh rates just
like CRTs.

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/other/display/lcd-parameters.html

A review of a 120 Hz monitor.  It's a TN panel, but the review
gives some reasons you might want 120 Hz.
http://xbitlabs.com/articles/monitors/display/samsung-sm2233rz.html

They even have 200 Hz:
http://DansData.com/askdan00043.htm

Oh, on the speed of LCD panels (e.g. "5 ms"), the specs are not worst
case like they should be.  xbitlabs and behardware.com have some useful
articles and reviews on these issues.  Also read up on "overdrive".
And of course dead pixel warranties.

> > http://www.behardware.com/articles/580-1/the-spyder-2-an-affordable-colorimeter.html
> 
> That's part of it. With analog CRT tech, you've got the electron
> beam stuff... astigmatism, focus, G2, raster geometry, etc. Then
> add your input signal and you've got RGB gain/bias.  And if it's
> NTSC you've got color decoding to deal with too. All that to tinker
> with just to set your reference color bars, pluge, CIE and grayscale
> correct. There's websites dedicated to that topic... avsforum, keohi.
> Old school broadcast stuff... still applies to digital, just doesn't
> involve as much electrocution :)
> 
> DVI-D LCD displays do away with all the analog bits of that. But
> they, in conjunction with the card, still need to display those
> reference files correctly. The windows guys seem to be doing it by
> poking at their card/driver somehow. If the knobs exist I could
> just play human comparator.

Given your interest in color calibration, I assume you want MVA, PVA,
or IPS with 8 bits/color, rather than TN with only 6 bits/color.

> http://my.ocworkbench.com/2008/gigabyte/GA-MA790GP-DS4H/g1.htm
> Rats, no ECC ram. And no, I don't overclock.

IIRC some mainboards "support" using ECC RAM but don't bother running
the traces for the extra bits.

> >> tuner
> 
> > Jason's cx88 driver (in ports) supports several cx88 based cards,
> > both digital and analog. http://corona.homeunix.net/cx88wiki
> 
> Thx, will look, need OTA, rest is optional, so this might work.
> Has anyone ported the pchdtv.com HD-5500 over yet?

The HD-5500 is listed as having full support for both ATSC and NTSC.
I have the previous HD-3000 (different demodulator chip) and both work.
Jason's driver gets the NTSC audio through PCI as you would expect.
Penguinix requires running an analog audio patch cord from the card
to an audio input on the mainboard or sound card.  What a kludge!
Even the HD-5500 has a ATSC demodulation chip that is now a generation
behind.  And I'm pretty sure it is still only one tuner per slot,
and PCI slots are going away.  There are cards with 2 tuners per slot,
but I don't know if they are any good, or if cx88 supports them.
If you need more than one tuner, maybe get 1 HD-5500 (assuming that's
the card you like) to get analog and then get rev2 (newer demod chip)
HDHomeRun(s) for the rest.  The HDHRs give more data on reception
quality than most (all?) other tuners.

ATSC reception is less reliable than NTSC, due to the "digital cliff"
effect.  You may need to upgrade your antenna.  If so, get the very best
antenna(s) you can find, to reduce multipath and interference as much
as possible.  Garbage in garbage out applies here.

> Well, if I was watching what appeared to be deinterlaced dvd [MPEG2
> 480p] on that Intel 1.8Ghz, then I'm hoping a 2.1Ghz or better will
> do 1080p. Need to find a 15sec raw HD stream to test the CPU and
> mplayer with.

OTA ATSC in the US is mpeg2 transport stream 480i, 720p and 1080i.
Max bitrate is 19.3 Mbps.

You can probably find samples on the web.  Recording ATSC takes
almost no CPU, it is just copying bit from the tuner to disk.
Analog recording takes a lot of CPU unless the tuner card has
hardware mpeg encoding (the HD-3000 doesn't, I don't know about the
5500).  So you could get a tuner now and get a mpegts file to play with.
And start working in getting reception dialed in before analog goes away.

> It gets pricy [$150++] and hot [95W/140W] to go faster or more cores
> after that sweet spot.

Can FreeBSD run different CPU cores at different clock speeds?
If so the power usage and heat issue might go away.

> Also don't know what all these new acronyms are... EXA, Xv, XvMC,
> UVD, UVD2, VDPAU, VAAPI. More stuff to google. Thx, heh.

IIRC:
Xv means the GPU handles scaling and color conversion (YUV to RGB).
XvMC means the GPU does most/all the mpeg decode.
UVD/UVD2 = special hardware on ATI GPU for video decode.  r600 has
UVD, r700 has UVD2.