Videocard with excellent TV-out quallity

[1972]

Hi all,

I'm thinking about buying a new videocard with a TV-out on it. But which one should I choose? I'm only interested in having great TV-out quallity and I am not planning to use it for 3D or game purposes.

I have read a lot of pro and cons on the X cards, but what about the ATI and NVidea cards? Anyone has some suggestions?

Thanks!

[hmca]

If you are not doing any games then you don't need a high end video card. I get along with an ATI 9600AIW non-Pro (No Fan), 128mb. It handles a TV and a monitor. With Nvidia Decoders it works OK for me, although VRM9 only looks great with DVD's and not recorded shows. Sharper with VRM7. May be my TV though. This card has enough RAM to get the job done and there is no fan noise or associated excess heat. But this is just one opinion and there will be others with suggestions of what works on their systems.

[dbfresh23]

I'll probably hear it with this comment, but from all the cards I've tested I've determined that it just doesn't matter. Video just doesn't have the huge reqs that gaming does. I would say that anything from Nvidia or ATI should be fine from the TNT and Rage128 or later. I actually also use the Onboard Intel 8mb Video on a mobo and it looked the same as my ATI Radeon 9700PRO(though I wasn't outputting the Intel to a TV). The drivers make the card, that's why I'd only suggest ATI or Nvidia.

[GbrNole]

wow - hang on that power thing is very dependent on how you intend to connect to the tv.

use only the svid out at 720x480 and most cards work just fine. throw vmr9 into the mix though and older cards will still choke even at 720x480 setting since they for the most part aren't dx9 compliant.

for svid connection i've had great luck with the nvidia 5xxx series and above. an older radeon 7000 i have provided an adequate svideo picture.

for component and dvi connection though it becomes a tossup between ati and nvidia.

i think my picture using mediator - dvi connection - 1080i res through my 6600gt is fan-freakin'-tastic but through sage it's good but not earth shattering. that's mostly because mediator has full screen renderless vmr9 which nvidia cards thrive on.

other people here have had great luck with ati 9600 (128-bit ram) cards using the component dongle for 1080i.

your best bet really is to let the forum know how much you would prefer to spend and a ton of people here will point you in the right direction.

[blade]

I disagree that any old video card is fine. There is a big difference between play back on a monitor and on a TV. I have a GeForce3 and it's TV output is horrid compared to my 6600GT. Also it doesn't always autodetect the TV correctly and has to be manually adjusted to even get it to display on most sets. Where as the 6600GT has always worked flawlessly with any TV I have connected it to without having to adjust the timing.

Personally I find that VMR9 looks better than Overlay on my TV. However, 720p is the highest resolution my 6600GT can handle when using VMR9. Until something changes I wouldn't suggest trying to run a 6600GT with Sage unless your TV can accept a 720p signal. I haven't had any luck using 1080i and VMR9, the stuttering is just to bad.

Of course all of that is if you're planning to output to a HDTV.

[fieldeffect]

My best advice if you're looking at TV out from a standard video card is to make sure that you never, ever, ever see the output from an XCard, PVR-350, or a Matrox card using DVDMax

Of the cards that i've owned/tried/seen i'd say that the difference between the TV outputs on all the standard graphics cards pale in comparison to the difference between all the other cards and the ones mentioned in the last paragraph.

If you're one of those "seeing is believing" people (I know I am), try getting hold of a cheap Matrox card that supports DVDMax and play a Sage recorded MPEG-2 file first in standard TV out mode, then turn DVDMax on and play it again. Your jaw will quite literally hit the table (I'm sure any users of these cards would agree).

Once you've got used to that level of quality it's hard to go back.

Nick.

[heffe2001]

Will DVDMax mode work with Sage? Or do you have to use a player from Matrox?

[fieldeffect]

Originally Posted by heffe2001

Will DVDMax mode work with Sage? Or do you have to use a player from Matrox?

DVDMax works with Sage, but you don't get the OSD.

Since DVDMax works by taking whatever is being written to the overlay surface and scales and outputs it with incredible quality, I don't see any technical reason why Sage couldn't write its OSD to the same overlay surface that it's writing the video output to.

I'm assuming that I *must* be missing something here, because if that were possible then you could have astounding quality TV-Out for virtually no cost (the cheapest Matrox DVDMax cards are pretty cheap), and I assume that Sage would already have done it.

If it is feasible but just hasn't been done by Sage, I wonder if it could be written as an OSD plugin? I'm guessing not because that would mean two separate processes writing to the same overlay surface which I assume isn't possible.

Anyone got any real information? (not to suggest that my wild speculation isn't well informed)

If this is possible we have to persuade Sage to implement it.

Nick.

[parkimar]

Hi,

I used to be a meedio user, but got sick of waiting for the Meedio TV.
It never used to bother me, until I upgraded my video card to a 6600GT.
I ran sage via the 350 TV output.

I decided to just check out the video quality of using the SVideo out of the 6600GT for playing live TV, after reading posts by Stanger Et Al.

Wow

I tested using the PVR350 out on AV1 and the 6600GT on AV2 of my 32 inch SDTV.

The 2 are identical, except that I can play Nero Recoded (MP4) and XVid, etc through my 6600gt. (And it's pretty good with games).

I've now almost completely retired meedio as I have an all in one solution now with sage. (Except for Audio CD playback as standard).

Cheers

Mark

[fieldeffect]

That sounds impressive What 6600GT card do you have? They're a bit expensive to experiment with. Do you not find the colours sharper and with better definition / less bleeding on the PVR-350? I'm probably looking a bit closer testing on a 42" screen, but it shouldn't be that much different.

If not then i'm wondering what the 6600GT would have that would make it so much better than other cards (i.e. is the TV out quality down to the fact that it's a 6600GT chipset, or just that your particular manufacturer has engineered a good TV out into it?)

Besides I suspect that if a 6600 GT came through the letterbox i'd have to sneak it very stealthily into the PVR before my girlfriend stole it for World of Warcraft the thing I like about the XCard is that it's useless for gaming so we don't feel bad putting it in the main PVR

Nick.

[Kanati]

A little late on the draw here, but I'm getting very good results from my radeon 9550 using DVI out at 1920x1080i using just the latest ati drivers. I didn't have to use any of the tweaking tools I was trying to get working with the geforce card. I'll stick with geforce for my gaming machines, but I am having better luck with ATI when it comes to tv out.