Plasma-related questions (video card, stretching)

[awetmore]

I just built a box this weekend for PVR use. I expect it to replace my Tivo over the next few months and give me multiple tuners and hopefully HDTV support later on.

My hardware:
* Panasonic 5UY EDTV plasma (856x480 resolution, plugged into the computer running at 852x480 resolution (no stretching, just 4 asted pixels on the side)). I'm using the VGA input.
* ABit NF7-S motherboard with AMD XP 2500+ (Barton) CPU.
* 512mb RAM
* NVidia TNT2 PCI video card (I expect to replace this)
* WinTV 250

I'm tuning Comcast cable. We have digital service, but I'm only tuning the analog channels right now (Sage is not controlling the cable box). I have the latest drivers for all of the hardware installed. I've tried both the elecard and Happauge MPEG2 decoders.

I'm having a few problems so far.

1) When I use Overlay mode I can stretch the image to fit, but the picture quality is horrible. It is very dark and it appears that every other vertical line is black. If I turn on DxVA the picture looks good but is very jumpy. Is this a result of using a PCI video card?

2) VMR looks great, but it won't expand the picture outside of a 640x480 box (I get sidebars). That is not good for burnin on a plasma.

Can anyone with this display recommend a video card, preferably an inexpensive one? I don't care about 3D. If I could do 852x480 over the component outputs of a videocard that would be a bonus because then I could route it through my receiver.

Is there any option for non-linear stretching on SageTV (something that approximates the Panasonic just mode)? Is this coming in Sage 2.0? If not this is probably a non-starter for me...

alex

[olyar15]

Try a low-end ATI Radeon card. I have a 9000(non-Pro) because it is fanless. Radeons have some of the best hardware-assisted video decoding. Also, what OS are you using and do you have the latest drivers?

Linear stretching works fine for me. I use VMR and Fill mode for aspect ratio. I don't use that model plasma, but have a 50" Pioneer running at 1280x768. SageTV works fine with a stretched picture.