I have an old HP that doesn't have video out, and I have an old Creative DXR3 (aka hollywood+) card.

I am building a small machine for playing Stepmania only, using Gentoo. I was wondering if the card can display S-video out for everything, instead of just dvd decoding. I know that Geexbox had good support for this card, but I don't really know if the same is possible on Gentoo, or how to do it, if it was. I didn't want to have to buy a pci graphics card, so this would be an easier solution.

If anyone has played with this, let me know.

zbarnes: they are all Linux distributions, therefor they all support the same hardware (more or less). I dono how Geexbox had you configure X, but if it was from the command line (and looked like the game "20 questions"), the setup should be the same.

Hi,

I guess the only way to do that is by having mplayer recode its output into MPEG2 which is what the DXR3 can decode. As you can imagine, this is cpu-intensive (video has to be decoded and re-encoded in realtime) so you better have a powerful cpu to do it.

But it can be done. :-)

Been checking around with the DXR3 project over at sourceforge and it seems like MPlayer is what makes it work. Geexbox is basically entirely mplayer, and since mplayer can take its menus and render them over the video, the Dxr3 is able to display the output.

On the card its self, no vga to video conversion takes place, but it can lay vga over the video, but only on the vga out line.

Looks like I will be buying an old pci graphics card with tv-out.