TV Out... NOT Impressed at all! (1 Viewer)

[Brett DiMichele]

Hey Folks,

Just out of curiosity I yanked my new PC off the desk and

took it out to the Living Room where I hooked it up to my

61" Projection.

The Video Card is an NviDia G-Force 3 Ti200 with DVI and

TV Out.

The Connection is S-Video and the TV is a 4:3 NTSC set.

I was not impressed at all at the quality of the picture.

I am sure it has more to do with the TV rather than the

Video Card, If I was to hook it up to an LCD or Plasma I am

certain it would be stellar but with an RPTV it just does

not cut it...

Has anyone else ran a PC on an RPTV with better results?

(I am sure an HDTV set would look substantialy better for

this type of useage)

 

[Vince Maskeeper]

The appeal of HTPC is not using it from the TV output on the video card. The TV out on most cards suck, and stand alone DVD is just as good.

The real power of HTPC is using the MONITOR connection- and using a HD compatible display device as a monitor than can resolve higher resolutions than standard NTSC.

If you're using a standard def tv, there really is little advantage to using a HTPC-- as tv outs on video cards offer no improvement (and are usually worse) that regular DVD players.

-vince

 

[Brett DiMichele]

I agree completly, those were my findings..
What exactly is the DVI connection for? I assumed that if
you are using an LCD Projector or CRT Projector that can
handle large native resolutions that these connect via the
VGA output. I haven't read any of my documentation to see
what exactly you connect to the DVI Port.

 

[Hugh M]

DVI is actually digital signals (as far as I know)..Its used mostly with flat panels, and digital projectors.

Funny thing is with TV-ouput that apparently those hollywood+ cards do a fine job at it. Thats the only thing they're really good for though.

Most video cards do suck at this, although with my findings it wasn't too terrible. I'm sure maybe some further tweaking could be done to make the picture look a little better on your set. But I doubt on a 61" TV its going to look "good".

I would think that you could get the same results from TV-output as you could with a standard svideo from a dvd player.

 

[Jeff Kleist]

The other appeal of an HTPC outside of scaling

Region hacking

DVD Subber (Let's you overlay subtitles on to any DVD, useful for films only translated by fans)

PAL/NTSC non-issue

Can anyone comment on the Raedeon's SVideo output?

 

[Kimmo Jaskari]

I personally also enjoy using a (HT)PC to record some TV material straight to MPEG and storing it on a harddrive. Outputting the image through S-video works quite well enough for regular TV.

 

[Hugh M]

my radeon 64ddr vivo usually either has broken support for tv out with some drivers, or is a royal PITA. For instance you have to run your monitor at the same res as the tv out (well at least the progressive equivalent resolution)... As far as I remember, (I got pissed and never tried it much after a certain amount of time) you even have to run a certain refresh rate, and can only run 800x600 when you use the tv out of a radeon 64ddr vivo.

 

[Duncan Barth]

I was doing some video tests with my AIW HTPC system (which is primarly used as an audio jukebox and cheap-TiVo clone). It looks like the ATI S-Video out has about the same horizontal resolution as a stand alone DVD player, but has about half of the vertical. What it appears to be doing is treating the TV as a 240line progressive scan device (drawing the same image on both fields), and filtering down the computer screen to that resolution.

Brett, if your card is doing the same thing mine is (which wouldn't surprise me, as its seems like the easiest way to convert a computer image to NTSC), it would explain the image quality issues you are having.

 

[Grant B]

I have been using a converter to run my PC into my TV. I was using a Sony 32KV series and it was so so but if I wanted to do some 'close up' work; I would hook up my monitor,

Upgraded to a sony 32XBR450 and now have enough resolution to even read small fonts without a problem.

Just picked up a COMPRO Personal Cinema card/with tuner box thingy.

hoping to use it has a cheapo tivo (without the big brother SW that is 'optional') and as a interface to bring AV into my PC to use with my DVD burner.

Just started hooking it up yesterday, but the quality seems to have gone up a notch.

Grant