Best card for tv out

[BluDChyLD]

I'm thinking of builiding a little DivX box for my bedroom with a tv out so I can watch my films on my tv. I'm keeping the specs fairly decent (1.2gig duron, 256mb ram, 30gig hdd etc...) But Im not sure what graphics card to get.

I heard nvidia is fairly poor for tv out, and that atis is better. Im considering picking up a cheap matrox as they're supposed have excellent tv-out but that would be no good for much esle. I doubt i'll play many games on this system but it would be nice to have the feature so a card with good 3d acceleration would be a bonus.
What do you recommend?
BluDChyLD

P.S Im thinking of buying an ati radeon 7500 as it's a good trade off between quality and performance. Here's the specs on the setup far, what do you think?

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/dawson.thomas/pc.jpg

[sarahjh69]

i have an ati AIW radeon
and a powered by ati 7000

the video out from the AIW is brilliant
the video out from the 7000 is not quite bright enough

i had a matrox g450 and the video out was not as good as either
ATI card!
i also have a nvidia tnt ultra with really naff video out

[Chyron]

Do radeon7500 works good with VIA chipsets? Does it affect tv tuner ?
I run into the troubles with "tnt2 vanta" and "aver tv studio" put together on kt266 mainboard (drops 2-5 frames at burst - so 200 drops per hour vs 9 drops with my old trusty diamond s460 (i740)) and want to upgrade to newer card (with decent tv out), but not ready to sacrifice capturing.

[sarahjh69]

capturing is very difficult to do and get a satisfactory result.
you need a fast processor and a very fast HD (if not raid)
or you will drop frames.
In my opinion capturing (real time) is still just out of reach
of most peoples systems.
I tried and gave up.......

Also the tv cards tend to have poor quality o/p so
the only real option is to capture from an external
video input....tv card just aren't up to it.

[Chyron]

>o/p
???
>external video input
You mean something like DV device + firewire?( My friend - proud owner of dc-30 and some dv camera (~$1000, is that expensive?) ,says that DV pass-tru gives him better results than dc-30.) Or you mean just poor quality of signal from internal tuner?
Oddly enough, i use my tuner mostly as tv-in - image quality from my vcr is better despite noise in composite link - interferences in PC case is reason, i just don't want to cover everything with screens.

And 7200rpm udma100 hdd IS fast enough for any tv capture. So applies for Duron1200 - yes, i can't capture full-res DivX realtime, but HuffYUV or MJPEG is better for full-res caps - anyway to get decent quality i need to filter, so the lesser losses the better.

Nevermind.

I bought radeon7500 today, and played with tv out a bit.
No major conflicts, fine quality - much better than tv-out on my friend's gf2ti or his SIS powered notebook. Also no such problems with compatibility between radeon7500 and bt878a based tv-tuner as was with vanta - no drop bursts, though a bit more drops than with i740 - ~17 per hour vs ~7.
Only two thing still bothers me - first, avi_io in overlay mode display noise in right of screen - some overlay problem. But so it was with vanta. I think it's due to irq 11 shared between videocard and tuner - but windows just not allows me to change it! :angry: and changing slot of tuner didn't help too.
Second - ffdshow locks system now. And i need this little cool util -
esp. as i want to use "theater mode" to watch cropped DivX films - natively they go full-screen thus totally messing aspect ratio. Of course for "theater mode" can be other solution, but i didn't found them yet as just bought card. And setting tv as "primary" isnt' good solution as i need ability to work and same time display movie.

And final - funny things.
As i'm lazy ;), i leaved s-video2composite convertor inserted, so now my dos mode is 50 Hz ;), that's funny to view - but who's using DOS? Not me, at least on duron1200 - k6-2 more suitable for old apps.
Second funny thing is that my tv allows to change hue only in NTSC mode , as i noticed by suddenly green face of Alyson Hannigan in American Pie 2 ;)(i used PAL, but movie is 23,976 fps so i switched to NTSC).