Best TV-Out quality? Yes I know about the Hollywood+

[Paiden]

I've been looking into Matrox G450 and various Ati cards (AIW Radeon, Radeon VIVO, AIW Rage 128 Pro).
I've also considered the Hercules 3D Prophet 4500 Kyro2 as I've actually seen the TV-Out quality of it, which
was not bad at all.

I'm ONLY concerned about the TV-Out quality of the card when playing Divx encoded material. That's
also why I've ruled out the Hollywood+ card as it offers no support for Divx, or can it do that with a
bit of tweaking?

As I've said the ONLY thing that matters is the quality of the TV-Out.

Thanks.

 

[rbV5]

The TV-out of both my AIW and VIVO Radeons is excellent IMHO. Divx looks great (when you use a high quality divx file of course) and I've noticed that the VCD's and SVCD actually look better on the TV-out than on the monitor. The TV display seems to handle the macroblocking that is quite obvious with some of my lower quality encodings on my monitor much better. When switching between the VCR (I use a VCR as my tuner for my VIVO) displaying directly to the TV vs going through my VIVO, I can get almost(not quite) the same picture quality, especially with the new overlay controls with MMC 7.5, and most definately a DVD played through the TV-out has a higher quality picture than if I play the VHS version of the same movie VCR>TV, but a DVD played on the set top box is superior to the Radeon's TV-out.

 

[Paiden]

Too bad that the Hollywood+ doesn't support MPEG4 material as it has the hands down best TV-Out
of any card. It is in fact said by many ppl to have as good TV-Out as a quality DVD player. Well I'm putting
this decision on ice for now until I get confirmed reports of Divx working properly on the Hollywood+. Other-
wise I'm leaning towards the Radeon VIVO or Matrox G450. Any thought on the Matrox? Considering that
I'm only concerned of the TV-Out quality, I play games on a different comp as you prolly already figured
(featuring a highly overclocked Gainward Ti200 "Golden Sample" with 3.8ns mem).

It's really only one choice here, go with the Matrox G450 as it's way cheaper than the Radeon VIVO.

 

[rbV5]

I've heard people say the Matrox has good TV-out as well, but to use the Rage Theater, you could use the Radeon Le, which features the same TV-out as the VIVO and priced less than $70 from Newegg when its in stock.

The Hollywood+ does have nice DVD-out(but only marginally better than the Radeon from what I've seen, certainly nothing like a quality progressive scan set top box, more comparable to the standard models that I've seen as low as $50 recently, so IMHO, thats the way to go if all your looking at is DVD playback), and I've heard of a poor hack that enables some divx playback (not good from what I've heard) but the pass-through cable degrades the 2D on your monitor enough to make it a poor solution at best.

Also, the AIW 8500dv will have DVI>component video dongle, that will certainly raise the bar as far as TV-out on the PC is concerned, perhaps the dongle will work on other ATI DVI cards as well?

Another solution is a high quality scan converter or get a TV with a VGA input, some higher end digitals have direct VGA inputs which with Powerstrip and a radeon card will likely give you the absolute highest quality picture.

Its all money and time with HTPC.