Question on TV Card and Widescreen.

[MrDSL]

Okay I am looking into getting a TV Card and have been doing some research which has been very confusing since I don't understand alot of the techno stuff involved but I think I have narrowed it down to either WinFast Deluxe or the FlyTV Platinium..

I have a new Dell 20 inch widescreen lcd monitor and I need to make sure whatever card I get will display correctly. I heard that the software that comes with the leadtek winfast will just stretch the picture to widescreen and make it not as clear. I have no idea how the flytv platinium software will handle widescreen..I'm also not sure about resolution as my monitors native res is 1600x1050 I beleive..

If I have to I would even buy software that will handle widescreen the best. If anyone has any info or experience with capture cards and widescreen monitors please let me know..

TIA

 

[Matthias99]

Any SD capture board will only capture SD material (duh ), which is inherently 4:3 (even "widescreen" stuff in SD is just a 4:3 signal with black bars at the top and bottom).

Your video playback software should let you either view it 4:3 on a widescreen monitor (with black bars at the left/right edges), or stretch it to a widescreen AR. It's no different than watching SDTV on a widescreen HDTV screen. The native TV signal will be something like 640x480, so it will be around a 1/4 screen window on your monitor unless you scale it up.

 

[duragezic]

I have the 2005FPW as well and was thinking about a capture card but 640x480 would be pretty pointless. I was thinking it might not be half bad using the Picture-by-picture/PiP on the 2005FPW (half screen of TV, half screen of computer), but that would require TV to be on the component input, which I'm not sure if that's how a TV card works.

There is no sort of simple device that takes a coax input and outputs to the yellow component plug?

 

[Peter]

16:9 broadcast on SDTV is sort of "condensed" horizontally. It's the DISPLAY end of the affair that stretches it back out or displays it with black bars, depending on the aspect ratio of the display device. The TV card just grabs the incoming signal, whatever it is.

The same applies to deinterlacing and scaling. The TV card doesn't do any of that. Typically this is left to your graphics card's video acceleration engine.

 

[Peter]

Oh, and I'd go with the FlyTV, if only for its universal tuner. I've tried their software on a minimal Windows system recently (a Duron-600 with a Radeon 9000pro), and it managed to run just fine on it (unless you'd use timeshift recording). Aspect ratio is selectable from various modes - 4:3, 16:9, freely stretched, etc. etc.

 

[kylebisme]

Originally posted by: duragezic
There is no sort of simple device that takes a coax input and outputs to the yellow component plug?

The yellow plug is composite, component is 3 seprate plugs colored red, green and blue. And no, no simple device can do that with either, well I'm sure you could make one but it would be pretty pointess as there would be no way to change channels. However, a VCR or cable box would output composite fine, and an HD cable box is what you would want for component.

As for tuner cards, I bought one of those Leadteks, and yeah the software that comes with it doesn't let you run a 4:3 image fullscreened with blank bars on the side, it just stretchs the image without any respect for the aspect ratio difference of the display. I now use an e-home wonder with Windows Media Center and that handles aspect ratios great as well as being very user friendly.