TV Out Old Style Composite

[Jreays]

I am trying to connect my computer to my older tv that only has composite video in. My Nvidia Video card has a composite tv out. The picture just doesn't look right. Colors look different and the picture is slightly blurry. Does anyone have any suggestions of a better video card or better connection method?


Thanks,
Jeremy

[CollinR]

Get an MVP or HD100 they will smoke all the PC video outputs and will open you up to a new concept and greater stability.

[CollinR]

The SageTV HD Extender aka STX HD100 is ~sometimes~ available at the SageTV.com store unfortunately it's only available at the SageTV.com store . It supports hardware decoding of just about any format and supports HDTV output.


The other is the Hauppauge MediaMVP with is available in a variety of places if you can get the more model version with SPDIF audio and the iirc 45 button remote control. This unit can hardware decode MPEG2 and MP3 and only supports SDTV output.

[Jreays]

I will have to check them out. I am on a bit of a budget so those might be too much. They sounds pretty cool though.

[CollinR]

They are 100% worth it.

[Jreays]

Can the MVP use the Sagetv interface?

[CollinR]

Yes you see exactly what you see on the server minus a few things in detailed setup that don't relate to the hardware clients.

Most plugins are also supported, all the really common ones anyway.

[Jreays]

Can it even do live tv?

[CollinR]

Dude it does eveything but get viruses, spyware, malware, need updates, have driver issues, blah blah blah.

It does everything you most likely do inside sage on the server itself.

I have mine doing:

Unsupported Extras
Dynamic Menus (heavily modded)
CallerID and text message popups (YAC plugin)
Speedfan / Motherboard monitor graphing works tracks custom processes
Home Automated Living interface, lighting and appliance controls
ComSkip
On screen remote to control external devices via IR or TCP/IP or RS232 or whatever via EventGhost/Girder anything with a command line interface.

Things they cannot do:

Surf the web
Use a media player other then SageTV's integrated player
Launch Windows, Linux or Mac applications on the screen


EDIT:
You will find as you stick around the key to happiness is a big honkn' server and one of the hardware clients at each TV. Reliability will go through the roof and the all the same interface makes it easy to train the fam.

[Jreays]

I am buying one now! Thanks for your help! I'll let you know what I think.

Thanks again,
Jeremy

[Taddeusz]

PC output through composite or even s-video is going to be pretty bad looking. It's just the nature of the two devices. The resolution of a standard TV is roughly 720x480. If your resolution is set to 800x600 or 1024x768 the chip on the video card has to down convert that to go into the NTSC (or PAL) video. As a result the picture is going to lose quite a bit of it's definition and look quite fuzzy. TV's are also not the most precise displays either.

Your color problem might be adjustable through the video card's advanced settings. But know that composite is never going to have that great of color anyway because of the way the chrominance (color) signal is sent along with the luminance (B&W) signal on the same wire. They tend to interfere with each other and you get smearing, ghosting and stuff. S-video is a much better way to connect to an SDTV. It sends the two signals across different wires and the result is a sharper more color correct picture.

But I agree with the previous statement that the HD100 is the way to go. Even and MVP would be quite a bit of an improvement in picture quality for SD video on an SDTV versus a client PC.