Video cards with Composite video out and Mandriva

[neftv]

I am looking for a video card where in GUI in linux I can select composite video out? I know NVideo probably has one but I not sure. Can anyone tell me if your using Video card where you can select composite video out (RCA)? Or if a video card can use an VGA to composite video adapter cable and function that way in Linux?
I am looking to play internet live tv feed(s) out (using VLC) of a linux box via video card that is yet to be determined.
Thanks in advance.

[disturbed1]

They used to make them. Now everything has S-Video out. It's pretty trivial to setup TV-Out with Linux. Plenty of easy to follow documentation and examples on the web. It does depend on which card you are using (Intel, AMD, Nvidia ...) and if you are using the Open Source drivers or the one of the proprietary drivers from Nvidia or AMD. Old AMD cards are pretty stable now with the open source driver, Nvidia from the fx5xxx line are a great choice when paired with Nvidia's binary driver. Just Google "Linux Nvidia TV out"

The oldest Nvidia card I presently have is an fx5500, which has S-Video out. It came with an S-Video to Composite adapter, but the image was all screwy. I also had an ATI Rage128PRO with composite out. Worked like a charm for simple stuff. ATI/AMD does not have any type of hardware acceleration for video render, so everything will be done with the CPU. A PII 450 should have little problem decoding standard def mpeg2 and mpeg4-asp (Divx, Xvid). You'll need something much more powerful for higher bitrate xvid and h264 decoding.

For h264 decoding, 8xxx series and up Nvidia GPU's can off load mpeg1/2, wmv, VC1, and h264 through VDPAU. Mplayer is the best shot with VDPAU. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VDPAU . One of our HTPC's is an AMD Sempron 3000+ (1.8ghz single core), with an Nvidia 9400GT, it can decode 1080P h264 content while using ~30% CPU. The VDPAU capable cards are not available for AGP slots (That I've seen). But are available for PCIe and plain old PCI.

[neftv]

Thank you for all that information. Basically my question is what card is presently out there that will do TV out with just a switch in the GUI of Linux? I have a radeon 7000 in one of my PC's and I could not get it to recognize the TV out. I was told that card is just to old. That why I said Nvidea but I don't know which one is a sure thing to work.

[disturbed1]

I have 2 PCI Radeon 7000's. One 32mb and one 64mb. TV-out works auto-magically. Plug the S-Video cable from card to TV=Cloned desktop, no configuration needed. KDE 4's setting manager can also control the the output settings for these cards. Where I can have a cloned output, or a second X session on each screen.

Try turning of the PC, run the cable from the PC to the TV. Tune the TV to the propper input, and start the computer.