We use TV-out on a regular basis now. I used to write stuff to SVCD
to view in our DVD player, but don't need to do that anymore.
The video card I bought is an NVidia Geforce FX 5200. Low price, fair
quality. Mine has dual output, so I run two monitors on it side by
side. Downstairs we have the same video card, but running only one
monitor. The SVideo output on that one is connected by a 50 ft SVideo
cable (!) to the 27" TV, and it works just dandy. Several years ago
we tried a Radeon All in Wonder, one of the earlier versions, and it
was fuzzy enough that we just didn't get really excited about it. But
this is as good as one can expect, similar to VHS quality. This is
more limited by the TV technology than the video card. An expensive
TV with higher grade inputs would give us a better picture, according
to a local technician, especially since this video card has a DVI
quality output.
We enjoy it just as it is though.
Last year I saw some kind of $500 video card running a plasma screen,
and the picture was nice and bright but text still fuzzy. For the
price of $100, this card does just fine for me, thank you very much.
One thing I have started to do with my cheapie TV capture card, as an
experiment, is to capture some of my old VHS videos to AVI, then play
them on the TV-out. For instance, old family videos we had digitized.
Works great!
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