High Quality TV-Out?

Right now I am using the cables that came with my video card to hook up with my TV, but it's really bad quality.

I don't know about this stuff, but as far as I can tell it's currently  a composite signal and the cable is RSA? What are the options for getting a better quality output and what hardware is needed? Thanks for any info!

use a YCA cable(or how ever it is called. -.-), they are normaly colored red, blue and green

There are three kinds of TV-out:
* composite (one video cable, two audio cables)
* S-video (one video cable, but with more than one wire inside it)
* component (the same three cables as in composite, but they all carry video)
You probably want an S-video setup; only an HDTV will improve past it, and your hardware probably already supports it.

you forgot SCART & RGB via SCART.
also:
* component (the same three cables as in composite, but they all carry video) <--no. composite is colored Yellow, Red, White. Component aka YCA is colored Red, Blue & Green.

morons.

It also helps to have a graphics card with decent quality Video support. A friend's Matrox card spits out /awful/ video (point-based interpolation?), whereas the onboard Trident-based graphics of my EPIA board does rather well (bilinear?)...

Thanks. So I need S-video? Maybe it's the standard for American TVs but for sure mine does not have one (UK). RGB via SCART sounds good but can I buy some kind of adapter?

My graphics card is Sapphire Radeon 9800 Pro - it just came with S-video and composite cables.

>>4

They are still the same three cables. Color-coding doesn't affect what kind of plug it is.

The best price/performance tv out i found for PC is the old "holywood plus" card by Sigma designs. Back in the day it was meant as a dvd player for your pentium 133 but the windows player was kinda crappy. Today, drivers exists for linux at http://dxr3.sf.net, you can compile xine or mplayer to enable support for it and with a little work, you get near perfect s-video tv output. With the input/output/postprocessing magic the mplayer offers you, this is my cheap htpc of choice. The card even has a spdif digital audio out, so you can hook it up directly to your surround receiver. Really nice piece of hardware.

I also have Matrox g450. Configured properly, it also has a decent tv picture, but compared to dxr3, its colors are a bit dull. Also, it is not so flexible with resolutions, cropping & co as dxr3 is. But i found its picture to be more stable on my tv - dxr3 looks like it's jerking up and down for about one or two tv lines.

I didn't have much luck with S-Video stuff in the UK either. RGB via Scart is definitely the best bet, yes.

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