what shouldbe the BEST quality TV card?

[saquib]

now that nvidia has its own tv encoder out, between nvidia and ati wat should be the best one to have HIGHEST quality in analog TV viewing. i dont care about the "dual" being a big deal. encoding is my second priority, im more focused on the viewing tv part!

[Áedán]

It rather depends on how you connect your analog TV to your graphics card. For example, composite video will give the lowest quality, S-video will give better quality, and RGB or component will give the best quality.

However, bear in mind that standard analog TV only does around 720×486 (NTSC) or 720×576 (PAL). Whilst many cards claim that they can show higher resolutions, your TV is very limited to the number of horizontal lines. That means that higher resolutions are scaled down to fit!

[saquib]

so, there's not much of any quality difference between different brands? shouldnt this upscaling process vary from vendor to vendor, making difference in the actual viewing? Besides resolution, there also should be noise filtering (broadcasted analog signal must be effected by noise) capabilities, color handling - stuffs like that which make someone to be on top.... errr..... in other wods, wats the best TV card rated on final picture quality??

[Áedán]

I'm a little confused here - you are wanting to output to a TV, or are you wanting to display TV on your monitor? You mention TV encoding in some places, and then upscaling in others!

[saquib]

Put TV in my PC (but internally), im sorry think i used the "encode" word accidentally.

[Áedán]

That's ok - this way I won't recommend cards designed to output to a TV!

I have a sneaking suspicion that the upscaling is actually handled by Windows or the player in use, rather than by the vendor of the card. That said, ATI do have a good reputation with things like deinterlacing.

[Chernobyl]

a nice solution is to make a projector from an LCD monitor
This will use the VGA connector for everything.
Home made projector!

[saquib]

how is ATI's TV Wonder Elite? can i use it with my nForce 4 SLI chipset mobo? does the theatre 550 chip make any difference? Also, my TV receptions are all PAL signals, is it avaible for PAL systems or just NTSC?

[benighted]

I got an ATI HDTV wonder last week. I had to send it back because it didn't work with WMCE at all!

[JimF]

I've used a Hauppauge card for years based on a BT848 chip from Brooktree (now known as Connexant). It does good capture and the drivers are stable.

A bonus is freeware called Dscaler4 (http://www.dscaler.org/). This offers advanced processing of the signal and accesses the card directly. I use it in preference to the applications supplied with the card and would recommend you select a card that is compatible with this.

The downside of most TV cards is that they need a fairly strong signal - it helps if you feed it from an aerial amp or via the in line amp in a VCR.

[saquib]

wat abt the PAL / NTSC compatibility issue? any PAL supported cards of this version??

[JimF]

Hauppauge (and many other manufacturers) do both PAL and NTSC versions (I'm using PAL).

The current version of the chip I quoted is the bt878 - which Dscaler also supports.