Recommended Video Card for Analog TV

[Tinker]

I have never seemed to have very good luck at getting a good picture by connecting my analog TV to my video card. I am really behind the times as far as television sets go. I still have analog sets. I have tried S-Video and Composite Video but the quality is much worse than the native analog signal from the coax.

I am currently using 2 MVPs on my 2 TVs. I am going to purchase an HDHomeRun tuner (dual digital ATSC tuner) and the MVP will not handle these recordings so I want to put a PC (GBPVR Client) on at least one of my TVs.

Am I doing something wrong or do I just need a really high end video card? Any suggestions on a video card that works well for this? What resolution works best?

[Deusxmachina]

I have never seemed to have very good luck at getting a good picture by connecting my analog TV to my video card. I am really behind the times as far as television sets go. I still have analog sets. I have tried S-Video and Composite Video but the quality is much worse than the native analog signal from the coax.

I doubt it's the TV's fault. I have a 50" analog Toshiba, (the last of the great analog rear-projections imo), and the picture is so good I'm not in any hurry to replace it. I also have a piece of junk analog 27" that can't compare to the Toshiba, but feed it a good signal and it's certainly not ugly or anything. Coaxial is a horrible signal. RCA/composite is much better, s-video a little better than that, and component might make you think you are seeing color for the first time compared to RCA/composite or coaxial.

Best bet now for a video card if the computer won't be used for games or anything is one of the newer HTPC cards. ATI has the 2400 and 2600 series, Nvidia has the 8500 and 8600. I have a 2400pro, which is fine for the sub-$50 I paid for it since it's hard to get ANY halfway-decent video card for much under $50, but I'm having my share of problems with it, mainly in it maxing out on anything more than simple deinterlacing of 1080i. I don't know if I'm missing a setting somewhere or what.

I don't know what you mean by what resolution etc works best. If you have an HD signal going to an analog TV, it will be downconverted to 720x480 regardless. What resolution REALLY works best is increasing the resolution (even on HD) using FFDshow or similar and then scaling it back down. That and a couple other filters can do some impressive things. I watched the HD King Kong DVD, said to be one of the best-looking HD movies, and it looked great, but then I added in some resizing and filters and the detail was crazy better. You need good computing power to do that stuff, though.

Anyway, maybe it is your video card. It's hard to tell what you mean by "bad" without seeing a screenshot, but even a 20-year-old TV looks good if you hook a DVD player to it.

s-video, composite, and component are all analog signals, btw. I'm guessing when you tried those other connections they were with adapters of some kind. Otherwise it's just plain weird to have any of them look worse than horrible coaxial.