Best tv out htpc

[Sgoaty]

I have been experementing with the tv out on my old ti500 and it is fairly pish to be honest. I could not put up with the interference in the picture and the blurryness if that was to be a HTPC. I am thinking of building such a PC but i just wondered how you guys get a nice clear crisp picture to your TV is it down to the graphics card? Connections? Cables? The tv I am using is a thomson 32" 100hz flatscreen
thanks in advance
Scott

[stdRaichu]

Disclaimer: apart from second and third hand tales of people telling me how (generally) carppy the TV-out on ATI GFX cards is, I don't have any experience with ATI cards.

IIRC, from the GeForce FX series onwards, TV-Out functionality was built straight into the silicon - so that TV chips were no longer vendor supplied (alot of vendors liked to cut corners and put in cheap TV chips, which I imagine is why so many people complain about ATI cards). Quality on thsioe has been pretty damned good if you ask me - hardly distinguishable for wacthing DVD's and the like.

If your TV has a VGA or DVI input, use that as there'll be no loss of quality save for the possible resampling to whatever res your TV is running at. Failing that, you're looking at a bunch of wires and/or adaptors to shoehorn your TV output to the avilable input on the TV (at a guess, SCART and S-Video). I use a small S-Video -> SCART adapter block.

Even if that fails to do much good, you can buy a scanline converter which goes between your VGA out and your TV's input, and these are capable of producing very good quality images.

[Alistair]

I have a 6600GT with component output going to my 36 inch Panasonic. Superb Picture on Cable or DVD's on my HTPC

[flid]

If you really care that much and can afford the sort of size displays that it's an issue with, the simple answer is to spend a few hundred and get a proper TV out card, not a PC gfx card with a novelty TV out that 99% of people don't use.

I think kustom used to sell em, but i can't see them anymore. I have the opposite, a sweetspot card that allows component and svideo in (http://www.pluggedin.tv/sweetspot/) that cost about 150. My HTPC's currently using a geforce 2 mx card's svideo output to a 28inch crt. It's by no means perfect, but it's pretty damn good and the gfx card has passive cooling by standard. Of course when I get a plasma in the future I'll just use dvi instead.