Debian Video Card Question, Nvidia and HDMI
 

In the immediate future, I intend to update my video card to allow the operation of all three of my monitors in a triple monitor configuration. I have a 790i motherboard with Nvidia chips, so I will most likely choose an Nvidia card for the upgrade. As I will need connections for three monitors, I will have to have two cards. It is my intention to have one large screen field spread across all three monitors. I assume the best way of doing this will be to use an SLI Bridge to link the two video cards. Thus the two video cards must be identical.

Question 01: Is this the best way of realizing a triple monitor setup?

While I am upgrading, I desire to also give the system the ability to play Blue-Ray High Def Movie one of the 1920x1200 monitors I will be using.

Question 02: What are the pitfalls of playing BD-Discs on Debian. I know I will be eventually acquiring a BD-Disc player (once the prices come down a bit more), but when shelling out for two video cards, I better think as far ahead as possible and get the two video cards that will do everything I can foresee them needing to do.

Question 03: As all of my monitors have HDMI input ports, I assume that I will need Video cards that have HDMI output ports to play full 1080P movies. Is this a valid assumption?

Question 04: Can anyone recommend a video card that does what I am wanting it to do? (This is to say Two Dual Link DVI connectors and an HDMI connector per video card with standard and high definition video playback capabilities). Keep in mind that I will most likely need to purchase two of them, to the Super Expensive Bleeding Edge cards are probably not going to be a practical option here.

Question 05: Is there a way that I can just play the BD-Discs with full resolution in a window on one of the three monitors I will have connected to the computer without having to go the HDMI route?

bruceam,

Wish I could be of more help. I only have a thought obout the last question. What about going the mythtv route to play the disk. As I remember it Mythtv was developing blue-ray.

:2cents

SLI? I didn't know it takes identical cards to set up three sreens, let alone SLI :confused:
Unless I am mistaken, the whole point of SLI is to make two cards output to a single screen while you appear to need the opposite. In fact, on the 790 platform, you should be able to combine onboard and discrete video so you need only one videocard.

It seems to me that a 9400 should work fine. Not suitable for gaming but passive cooling will save you the annoyance of a fan constantly humming in the background while you are watching your movies.
You do not necessarily need HDMI output on the videocard; most videocards today come with a DVI-to-HDMI convertor. There really isn't much of a difference between the two; essentially, HDMI sends sound over the same channel as video while DVI does not; the image quality is identical. DVI can display 1080i just fine; no problem on my Samsung T260, although it needs to switch to 1080i from its native 1920x1200 first if I don't want any black borders.

MythTV
 

Thanks rbees,
I have been hearing a lot about MythTV for quite a while, but as I don't have a TV-Tuner card, I reasoned that it wouldn't be worth installing on my setup. I will Definitely check it out.

To jay73,
You may be right about the cards not needing to be identical to use and SLI strapping. I thought I had read somewhere that all of the cards in an SLI strap had to be identical. I will look into it. It would probably be a good idea for them to be the same, if for no other reason, than to make the output ports insenstive to a specific video card.

As I will be hooking up three monitors, I will need a minimum of three video connections. Most video cards have only two, so I will need more than one card. To make everything "Play Well With Others", I am looking at the SLI configuration to give me both the number of Video connectors I need, and to integrate the video subsystems into one entity so that the desktop (and the TTY) environment will be simplified, at least from a systems perspective. I have already gotten the NVidia Drivers to work, and figured out how to set everything up in the Xorg.conf file, so once again, this seems to be the most logical direction to go.

I was looking at the GeForce 9 Series, so we are thinking along the same lines there. I had read though that all of the High Definition Video Disks (Blue Ray and HD-DVD) incorporated something called HDCP (High Defintion Content Protection). This basically scrambles the signals out of the player so that only devices that it recognizes can properly interpret the information. I thought that HDMI (High Definition Media Interface) interconnects were part of this "recognition" process. I do not know for certain if this is true, hence my questions on the forum. I will definitely look into the DVI-to-HDMI conversion process.

Well, Thanks for the input to all of you who responded. I have found the solution to my questions. The BFG site referred me to a rather obscure page on the NVidia site that said:

Yes: it is possible to have more than two monitors connected to one computer, but the following configuration must be adheared to.

Connect the first two monitors to the first graphics card (can be multiple graphics cards in and SLI configuration). The third (and fourth if applicable) monitor(s) must connected to another graphics card (GeForce 8 series card that is PhysX capable and has at least 256MB of memory) that uses a different graphics processor family from the first card (SLI Pair or SLI Triple bundle of cards). It will be necessary to run GeForce R180 drivers (or later) in order to make this work.

Up to 6 monitors total may be enabled by using the configuation described above and the motherboard's GPU.

I haven't found many answers to the HDMI questions, but the GeForce 9800 family and the GeForce 295 family have built in HDMI connectors on their interface panels. Several of the other cards in the 200 series claim to be HDMI ready by using a DVI to HDMI adpater. The documentation ont he NVidia site indicates that "Other HDMI Certified Components are Required" to view HDMI content with their cards. I take this to mean an HDMI certified monitor and probably an HDMI Certified Blue Ray Disk drive.

I haven't any information on a practical way of bypassing the whole HDMI garbage and just viewing the content within a window on any one of the displays.

If anyone has any input on how to configure a triple monitor HDMI Capable system, please feel let me know the details.


Thanks again.