TV out quality

[Mr T]

Doubt wether a crt would have those!

It doesn't. The TV just has RGB scart, svideo and composite

[nemulate]

Are you sing Catalyst drivers? If so you might want to try setting the tv settings in the Catalyst Control Center to ntsc even if you have a UK tv (Obviously I accept no responsibility if it breaks your tv, not that it should!). It worked fine on my old Toshiba tele. This made the picture a lot more stable and also the setup on the Toshiba allows me to adjust the picture sharpness which again made a lot of difference. Apart from that don't think you'll ever have a brilliant tv with just a standard s-video coneection, sorry

[gEd]

In order to get good s-video/composite video output on your video card, you need to configure it into "video mode".
<snip>

5) Go into the TV properties tab and Adjustments sub-tab and enable "video mode" and apply.


Video mode overrides the scaling and directly maps the pixel rows to the TV scan lines as a one-for-one mapping, hence the significant inprovement in video quality on the TV. This however is a double-edged sword because while you have good video, you will now notice that the Windows desktop edges disappear off the TV screen - this is normal due to the overscaning that all TV's do (I lift the taskbar to double-height to compensate).

Other points:
This ATI driver also provides hardware adaptive vector/motion deinterlacing which is usually far better than your software "bob" deinterlacing, so configure your software players to use "weave" (no) deinterlacing and let your video card do this for a superior output.
I also recommend enabling DXVA on the video card to help reduce CPU load, via the CCC video tab, and all-settings sub-tab and enable "Windows Media video Acceleration". However please note this only kicks-in with single display, so you must disable you monitor display and only have your TV display for this to work.

Best of luck.

this is great info - thanks!

what ATI card are you running this setup with. I tried video mode on my 9600 and the desktop/gbpvr looks terrible - very flickery. [edit] have'NT compared video quality tho.

with this setup, i can now remove powerstrip which i was using to force 720x576.

[nemulate]

Yes tried this also and gave up as scrren 'shakes' too much! Like I said setting my ati to ntsc works best for me.

[csy]

this is great info - thanks!

what ATI card are you running this setup with. I tried video mode on my 9600 and the desktop/gbpvr looks terrible - very flickery. [edit] have'NT compared video quality tho.

with this setup, i can now remove powerstrip which i was using to force 720x576.

gEd - I'm using an ASUS (ATI) 9550 with composite TV-out to PAL TV (New Zealand), and the video quality is very good (nearly as good as standalone DVD player). The desktop is very flickery because video mode disables any processing within the video card, hence disables the anti-flicker adjustment on the CCC TV properties tab. The s-video/composite output on the video cards will never be very high quality. The only way to get a very good output is to use DVI-out or VGA-RGB adapter if our TV supports these interfaces. Note also the ATI VGA-RGB adapter is NTSC only.

Nemulate - I am surprised to hear that forcing NTSC improved quality for someone in a PAL country. This means you must have a muti-standard TV that supports PAL and NTSC, but if your source video is PAL (MPEG2 720x576) then there is a conversion from 576 lines down to 480 lines which I would expect to reduce the quality. But if it works for you, thats cool.

gEd - I'm pleased to hear you can ditch Powerstrip, I recommend to avoid using Powerstrip if you can. Video cards by default have an internal genlock which locks the video output clock to the incoming frame-rate from the video renderer, and your TV in-turn locks to the video card signal, hence all timing is synced and no dropped frames. Powerstrip overrides the video card clocking with your forced parameters which is not synced to anything, hence the posibility of dropping frames.

[gEd]

csy: thanks for the info.

Are you saying that you put up with the flickering desktop/gbpvr in order to get a better (composite) video image? - or do you not see flickering on your tv?

AFAIK, s-vidio is the best (and probably only) way of hooking up a pc to a crt (besides the awsome wega's), short of hacking together a vga -->rgb cable and then playing with powerstrip to control the timings.

s-video is technically superior to composite as it carries the brightness and colour seperately, whereas composite combines them (which I am sure you know)

The only time I tried composite on my (Panasonic PAL) rig it was terrible, whereas s-video is comparable with live tv, although there is less noise and perhaps a little less detail as a result of the image being smoothed out.

[csy]

Hi gEd,

Yes, I unfortunately put up with the desktop flickering (don't really notice it within the gbpvr though) in order to get good video picture. From researching on the Internet, it appears the bad desktop flickering is related to the interlacing function on the TV-out component of the video card. I'm therefore guessing that if you can use progressive output (DVI/RGB) directly into your TV then there is no flickering (someone who uses DVI or RGB might like to comment on what desktop flickering they experience).

I have also noticed through experimentation that some form of deinterlacing is always required for live-tv or playing back recorded live-tv (the ATI-550 card records interlaced format into the MPEG stream), otherwise the picture is a complete mess with no deinterlacing. This indicates to me that the video card does not transparently forward the interlaced video directly to the TV-out, but instead appears to reconstruct progressive frames, then re-interlaces those frames again in the TV-out component. This process of de-interlacing and re-interlacing is why i believe the TV-out quality is never as good as DVI-out or VGA/RGB-out because the DVI and VGA skip the re-interlacing and hence produce a higher quality picture.

I also agree that s-video is superior to composite for the reasons you mentioned, however my TV only accepts composite or component (Y,Cb,Cr) interlaced inputs, so I'm stuck with composite for the moment. I don't have too many problems with composite but definately notice colour-luma crosstalk on things like tweed jackets and pin-striped jackets etc which really show-up the shortcomings of composite signal. I see ATI have announced that their X1000 range video chips are capable of component output, so I'm waiting for a hardware manufacturer to make such a card then I'll buy one (only at a reasonable price), but with my TV component input still being interlaced format i'm not expecting any great improvement. I really need a new TV with progressive input.

[dneprrider]

I really need a new TV with progressive input.

In the end this is what I did too. I had an S-video feed from my Nvidia MX440 (with S-video & DVI o/p) to my CRT TV s-video input and it was quite good. Live TV and mpg2 quality was very good, but I also used the TV to read web pages from my gbpvr computer. I had to set the text to large to be able to read.
In the end I decided to get a HDTV 42" plasma "Sansui HDPDP4200" with a VGA and HDMI input. The picture with VGA is so crisp and clear that I could never go back to the CRT. I haven't purchased a DVI to HDMI cable yet but that is my next purchase. I don't know how much an improvement HDMI/DVI will be over VGA?
Regards,

[Mr T]

so the conclusion is i should abandon my HTPC project until the wife lets me buy a HDTV.

How can an xbox manage such a good tv out?

[nemulate]

Xbox is designed for tv output from bottom up, nothing else!