Poor Resolution from Radeon 9200SE Video Card

[eekstra]

I have a AMD 1.2MHZ CPU with 700 Megs of ram and a Hapauge HVR 1600 tuner. I have connected it with the composit port from my Radeon 9200se video card to my 42in plasma TV. I am getting really poor resolution on the scree from this hookup. I looked at the video card settings and I am not seeing anything that would improve it. I have the resolution of the video display at 800X600 at 16 bit color.

Any advice or help would be appreciated. Thanks!

[wtg]

Not too surprising as there are a number of factors coming into play. First, the composite output only truly supports 480 interlaced scan lines, so the 600 lines are being forced into 480, while the vert lines of 800 get squeezed into 720 - that's hard on the image. Second, your TV then has to convert the already messed up 720x480 image into it's native resolution, probably 720 or 768 horizontal lines and 1280 or 1366 vertical lines depending on the display, scaling up and introducing more conversion artifacts.

The composite cable is the lowest quality choice too. If your Radeon supports SVideo you may get better results. However, your best bet by far would be to use a VGA port on the TV is yours has that. Then you could set the resolution on the PC to whatever the TV supports.

If your TV doesn't have a VGA input but supports DVI or HDMI, you could always upgrade your video card to one with a DVI output and connect that way. This provides the best image quality by far, and it's easy to find even among the cheapest video cards these days.

[stustunz]

dont mean to be a sad sack but that card is just a little bit below the minimum you need so overlay will be the only thing to use that means pvrx2 is out
go buy a new card you will not regret it they are cheap these days anyway for what you need
sub says the 9500 is good for SD playback
personally i would go a bit higher especially since your system isnt exactly a power house

[sub]

sub says the 9500 is good for SD playback

I wasnt saying that was a recommended minimum. In that thread I was just saying the guy's 9500 should be fine.

I use a Radeon 9250 in my lounge PC and it works just fine for standard definition stuff, so the 9200SE might work also. I'm connected to my TV via DVI though, which is going to be a lot different than attempting to use the composite connection.

[stustunz]

ok sorry sub
you had said previous that you use a 9500 so i asummed it was ok
i wasnt exactly saying it woulkd be minimum just that it would work
as i have previously had a 9200se and it wasnt as good as i would like
im sure there is something diffrent between the 9250 and the 9200 that makes it not that good at mpeg playback but cant remember

[Ted the Penguin]

IIRC the 9250 is basically a 9500, and the 9200 is much older/weaker. also, it is not really supported anymore, whereas the 9250 is.

[wtg]

Actually I have a 9200 in an older PC and it's playback of SD stuff is very good with low CPU utilization using the ATI special edition Cyberlink decoder that came with it. Other decoders put a bigger hit on the CPU.

However it was quite a while ago that I used it for playback, using an older gbpvr release and outputing to a SD TV. I never tried hooking it up to my HD TV and I wouldn't expect fantastic results.

[nitrogen_widget]

I think the 9550 is the lowest radeon with full directx 9 support.
I've got 3 of them in various PC's & they work great for GBPVR.
I get fairly low cpu usage on a p3 PC.

[Ted the Penguin]

maybe that is what I was thinking about 9550 basically being a 9600. sorry

[eekstra]

OMG, I did buy a samsung with a VGA port and I just hooked it up. It was an amazing difference. I will take your advice on the new video card. This is all that I had laying around at the time . I just started to play with this technology so I didn't want to spend to much money on a system.
Thanks for your feedback it was extremely helpful!!!