TV-Tool makes TV-out look terrible?

[Def]

I just got a spicy new 25" Sanyo TV w/ S-Video input. While not the snazziest TV out there, it fit within my poor college budget.

Anyway, started trying out my TV-out on my Gainward GF3 Ti-200 for the first time and notice that it looks pretty darn good just firing it up. I had heard good things about TV-tool, so I decided to fire that puppy up.

Long story short, it makes the display look like crap. I'm currently typing this post using the default nVIDIA TV-out, and am using the 23.11 drivers. While it is not perfectly centered, it is only off by ~.5" max. Almost not noticeable.

When TV-tool is enabled, all fonts become unreadable and the color looks pretty washed out. There is also this weird "honeycomb" pattern all over the screen. Hard to describe, but it is very faint.

I'd really like to use TV-tool to slightly center the display, but it ends up making everything look terrible. No way I'm going to pay to register a program that kills the functionality that it is supposed to correct.

Oh, btw, I think my Gainward card uses a Conextant video encoder chip.

Thanks for any replies.

Def

 

[sc0tty8]

Every tv out I have seen makes the fonts almost unreadable. I gots me one of them 27" sanyos....

What kind of cable are you using? A cheap s-video or a good s-video? How far is it being run?

 

[Def]

Sorry, maybe I wasn't clear in my original post(it was between e-mag and biology studying&roll.

The default TV-OUT in the NVIDIA 23.11 drivers looked pretty good. While the desktop was certainly not monitor quality, I could definitely read text at 800x600 with large fonts. DivX movies looked amazing. Way beyond my expectations after hearing the nasty things about NVIDIA's "poor implementation of TV-OUT in their drivers". This is with a 6ft "high quality" RCA S-Video cable. It looked to be pretty good, at least the best they had at Wal-Mart at the time when I went cable shopping(cost a whole 50 cents over the cheap-o as well).

When using TV-Tool(a shareware TV-OUT tweaking utility), I get an extremely blurry picture with washed out colors. I've heard of TV-Tool fixing problems like this, not causing it.

I'm just wondering if there are any settings or things I should be looking for. No options I tried really got rid of the washing out of the color. The FlickerFilter all the way made the image go from disguistingly blurred to just blurred. Way worse than the default NVIDIA implementation. Enhanced Text and non-Interlacing also made small improvements, but nothing major.

So any ideas ppl?

 

[videobruce]

I have used TV tool myself with a nVidea GeForce2 MX400 chip and never had a change in image quality.
I don't know what would do any of this.

Try color carrier, macrovision & flickerfilter.
I assume you are in NTSC?

The only other thing would be it is corrupt and try removing it and reinstalling it.

I gave up on the built in so called 'NTSC' chips that these cards have.
They all suck.
800x640 is not acceptable to me, and the limited sizeing isn't either.

I went to a external converter from Grandeview ( the 'Ultimate XP' Taiwanese import, not readily available for sale in the US) and a active splitter from Aten ( better known in video as a DA (distrubtion amp)) since the 'H' cable from Grandeview didn't work without smearing up the computer monitors image.
I can continiously adjust the size and position anyway I like it.
The best thing is: this is separate from the cards settings. I don't have to resize my desktop or change refresh rates, or worry about the dualview setting which has problems anyway and slows the card down.
The newer nVidea chips don't have dualview as far as I know.

 

[Def]

I'm really pleased with the TV-Out on my Ti-200. Other than it being about .5" off center, there is absolutely nothing wrong with it. No tweaking even required.

While it is a bit of a pain to not have Dual-View on the monitor and TV, it is not that big of a deal IMO.