MythTV the GT220, HDMI and ALSA

Grabbed a Gigabyte GT220 based card for the MythTV box. $86AUD from msy.com.au. Dropped it in the Mythbox and it fires straight up for video, configure for VDPAU and we are good to go. The driver was NVidia’s 185 which produced a lot of tearing/vsync issues and an upgrade was in order. They’ve done some repackaging of the NVidia drivers which caused a bit of grief with one of the libraries (I ended up using dpkg – r to remove it as apt-get remove or aptitiude would try and remove MythTV, the packagers of Mythbuntu binding the NVidia drivers to MythTV itself, oh well).

So the upgrade to NVidia 195.36 allows me to fully use VDPAU on the GT220, the output quality is great and the CPU (C2D E4600) runs at about 5-10%. Happy with that 😉

So next is the HDMI audio. A little bit of a task of recompiling ALSA with the GT220 patch from XBMC (check out XBMC btw, create software I’ve been using it on my modded XBox-1 for years now and have always been impressed). So for those with a GT220 and wanting HDMI Audio on ALSA check this out http://wiki.xbmc.org/?title=HOW-TO_set_up_HDMI_audio_on_nVidia_GeForce_G210,_GT220,_or_GT240