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Advice needed: Best quality TV out [s-video] card

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Terry

Member
Joined
Dec 23, 2000
Believe it or not I built this cube to strictly run with a 36" normal TV. For now no intentions to hook it up to a PC monitor. It runs great! Disabled onboard video [no s-video out] and slapped in a GF4 440MX I had laying around. Got it up and running on a monitor... no problems.

Then I hooked it up to the TV via S-Video. Not impressed at all with the video quality. Only 2 modes available are 800X600 and 1024X768. Movies do not look near as good as they do from my regular home DVD player.

What would you recommend as a great/good card based on TV out quality only? No games will be played. Strictly for DVDs/SVCDs/VCDs/DIVX/XViD/Music/JPEGs... multimedia.

Cost needs to be reasonable.


Thanks for the input :)


Specs:
Antec Aria Cube
Intel 865 MicroATX board
2.8C P4 HT
2X512mb PC3200
160gb Seagate SATA HDD
Lite-On Combo DVD/CD-RW
Hercules Fortisimo 7.1 soundcard
Firewire card
Logitech 5.1 speakers
Logitech wireless keyboard/mouse
External Firewire 8X DVD burner [shared with other PCs]

Onboard Video and Sound disabled
 
They look fine using the svideo out of my 8500LE - no different then a set-top DVD player.

Best quality possible would be a 9600 class card with the component out adapter if your TV supports it.
 
If its not an HDTV, you are doomed to horrible quality. I cant read text on any resolution on any tv other than my HD. I agree w/JCLW though, any ati card 8500+ will do well. I heard the 8500 had a digital decoder, while hte 9000&9200's had analog. I dont know about newer card.
 
Yuriman said:
I heard the 8500 had a digital decoder, while hte 9000&9200's had analog. I dont know about newer card.
You're thinking of the AIW cards - They tried a digital tuner on the 8500 but then went back to an analog tuner because there wasn't any noticable difference between the two. Except price.
 
You might want to try an ATI All-In-Wonder card. I believe you can't display higher than 800x600 unless you have an HDTV...not positive.
 
Thank you guys! :)

Any more input?

How about the 9600 AIW... am considering one of them.
 
From experience hooking the dvi out of a Radeon 9600 to the dvi in on my HDTV didn't work out so well, even with considerable toying with the drivers.

If you don't have HDTV I'm not sure where to steer you, probobly and All in Wonder, the cheapest one you can find. Non HD resolution doesn't really matter because the resolution of the tv is so bad, so really you just need a decent output signal, which the All in Wonder should provide.

If you are talking HDTV though I'd say just get dvi to component converter. And any vid card that has dvi out. Here is the first one I found with a google search: http://www.svideo.com/hdtvaiwr8500.html
 
almost any card - even that mmx440 and an AIW will likely have similar results because you are limited to the low resolution of your TV - you maybe able to do 1024 x 768 on your tv but i beleive it is an emulated resolution.
 
Mr.Guvernment said:
almost any card - even that mmx440 and an AIW will likely have similar results because you are limited to the low resolution of your TV - you maybe able to do 1024 x 768 on your tv but i beleive it is an emulated resolution.

dito with more detail:
some/(most?) HDTVs can do 1080i and 720p --> translation: 1080/2 = 540 or 720 horizontal lines. So the 720p is relatively close to 1024x768.

all HDTVs can do 480p ---> 640x480 resolution

non HD Tvs display 480i ---> 480/2 = 240; most regular tvs have between 200 and 300 scan lines (ie even less than 640x480)

even if you are hooking up to an hdtv, if you are using s-video you are limitted to 480i and if you are using a regular tv your resolution is even lower, so anything above 640x480 is just being wasted (and since 640x480 isn't exactly a challenge for a video card, the quality of the card shouldn't really matter)


Edit:
I just re-read the original post (I'm bad at paying attention). In my experience 640x480 looks better on tvs than the higher resolution, just because of the limitations of the tv. I notice your card doesn't support 640x480, perhaps you should try to find a card that does.
 
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