Anyone hooked up a computer to a highend tv?

[ivwshane]

I'm in the study/planning stage of looking for a computer and tv to use for a multiperpose multimedia system.

As I was doing some research I saw an article on an adapter ati will have that takes from a computer and connects it to a tv's components bypassing any imaging processing the tv does to the signal.

I'm looking to get a pretty nice tv, something like a sony xbr but I don't have, nor do I plan on, getting satelite or digital cable and I've seen how normal cable looks on high end tv's and it sucks.

My question is, has anyone done something similar? I know you can have your video card do tv out but it's usually s-video which will still be affected by the tv's image processing which will defeat what I'm trying to do.

If you have done it how does your standard tv signal look? If you have played a dvd from your computer to your tv how did it look and by doing so am I basically creating a progressive scan dvd player?

 

[AnAndAustin]

You will want to ensure the best possible DVD/MPEG playback and as such you may be best to get a decoder card. To be brutaly honest you may be a little unhappy with your results, even on 100Hz tube TV sets the artifacts inherent in DVD-quality video become more evident. It may be worth you considering a Rad9000 ($80) or Rad9700 ($400 LOL) gfx card (MPEG decoder hw built in) as these can use the DX8 hw to effectively enhance and reduce MPEG artifacts.

Anyway, I'm no expert on this but the best TV set will still be FAR lower quality than an average monitor, fine for video etc but you will still find even 800x600 is relatively illegible even on the biggest and best TV.

 

[Eagle17]

Ok here is my take, I have been using a computer with my TV's for more than 5 years now.. I started off just wanting a cool mp3player and now I have a full mini-movie theatre. First of all "the best tv set" is a computer monitor.. modern HDTV's are basicly non-interlaced displays capable of some very awsome desktops. now here you have to make a choice are you going to use HDTV set (with the component input) or sdtv set (standard def.)? you can get a toshiba SDTV with component inputs but they are not the same as the digital inputs that an HDTV uses.

HDTV - you can find HDTV sets for very close to the price of a similar sony XBR. I have loved sony for years but even a lower end RCA HDTV blows the XBR SDTV picture out of the water. In this case you can do one of two things.. buy a Video card of your choice and get a transcoder (audio authority makes one #9a60, with this you would also need to spend some time working with powerstrip and getting the screen adjustments just right (this could take hours and if you reformat your computer or change the video card you will have to do it over again) the benifit to this is the ability to illeagaly watch DVD at high res(more on that later). Or you can get an 8500 series and the ATI component dongle and just install the drivers to get your desktop on your tv... the only problem is that you can not get rid of overscan with the current catylist drivers. and you can only watch DVD's with macrovision at 480p (the same res as a progressive DVD player). although you can view your desktop at any res your TV supports. This is the BEST scenerio as you are seeing the video as pure as it was recorded ...


SDTV - you can get any new video card (ati radeon of any version with TV out or GF4ti any version) and hook it up to the svideo input and watch tv... The desktop will not look great and words will be hard to see but it is far better now than when I started doing this. you will notice movies being as good here as they are directly from your dvd player. the ati will give better DVD playback -see below.



ATI DVD playback, I am so tired of going over this .... basicly ATI has hardware that cleans up and prosesses the DVD signal this is many time better than a software solution but you may not be able to "see" the difference. however ATI also has 10bit DAC's. This allows a much higher color bandwidth than the 8bit dacs found on all geforce products.. but you HAVE to compare them side by side to really notice the difference.


overscan as mentioned above is where the picture is larger than the display device. this means that part of the picture is cut off. on a monitor the system know s how to set up the display timings from the DDC info it gets from the monitor... HDTV's do not have ddc there are not enough pins in the hdtv standard to support that.

please post away if you have more questions or feel free to check out this forum in the htpc forum. avsforum

 

[ivwshane]

Thanks for the info guys.

I plan on getting a radeon 9700 all in wonder because it has a digital tuner (nothing special but it's a quicker tuner than the tv wonder I have) and because of the built in mpeg2 support.

I plan on getting a ~36" hdtv ready tv like the sony xbr or a samsung (I've been hearing some really good things about the new samsungs, like they use sony tubes but without the price tag).

Anyways my goal is to get the highest quality picture on my tv (mostly the tv signal coming from the 9700) and of course be able to have a high quality dvd playback as well.

 

[OneOfTheseDays]

or you could get a highend mitsubishi which actually has a VGA port built in .

 

[klah]

If you go to a real home theater store (as opposed to Best Buy, Circuit City, etc.) they will let you bring your PC in and try it out with different televisions.