Hi

I have a NVIDIA GeForce4 (MX 440 AGP 8x) and I connected it to my TV so I can watch movies on a bigger screen... It was easy to install thanks to envy by alberto milone

It works ok but it seriously slows down the computer. I believe it's due to some issues with the NVIDIA driver, or maybe the graphics card is not very powerful.

Anybody here using a graphics card with TV-out? I'm looking for advices on which one works best under linux.

Thanks

I have a MX 440 AGP card - I think it's running at 4x. It's so old - it uses the nvidia driver for all cards from the last millenium. I heard they were giving mx-440s away in breakfast cereal boxes about 5 years back ;-). Mine is at least 9 years old. Now the proprietary libs (e.g. libGL.so) that nvidia install for that are too old and will clash with modern stuff. Even agp is an issue - you are better with pcie.

Have you ever thought of upgrading? You want PCIE and a newer card. I would at least try slowing it to 4x and see if that improves it. Otherwise get a debug going and find the errors, which I presume exist.

Yeah I have thought about upgrading. However, I would like to be sure that it will solve the problem first. Besides, it's not so easy to upgrade: my motherboard is old too, it does not support PCI-E.

Btw, I just tested: when configured in clone mode instead of 'separate x screen', it's so much faster!

With these proprietary drivers, some things are better implemented than others. I never had any snags with my mx-440. Never tried tv, though. With mplayer, you will find certain approaches work better than others. Try mplayer -vo help. Then run through them, and eliminate any that have issues at fullscreen.
That done, you may be able to configure your system to use an approach that your system likes. I have a 64 bit box here that only runs well on

mpolayer -vo sdl. Try that one (sdl = Simple Direct Layer) for starters. Also check you have dri.