tv & tv games better on tv box or tv card?

[faye]

Hi,

My display is a Viewsonic 2025w @ 1680*1050@60Hz

Currently my tv box support 1024*768@75Hz

My most concern is to watch television and PS2(2 not 3 yet)
using d-sub from tv box to LCD.

One of the reason i bought a tv box instead of card is i heard that i don't have to turn on my PC if i want to watch TV. but now i find that I always turn on my pc 24/7, so I wonder if tv and games quality will be better on TV card instead? and which brand? the only reputated brand i know is Leadtek/Winfast TV2000 XP Deluxe

 

[YOyoYOhowsDAjello]

Having lag introduced by going to a tv card is a common problem for a lot of people. I don't know if there's a good card out there for you that would avoid that issue.

 

[Peter]

What do you think is the TV box doing differently than a TV card would? Answer: Not much. What either solution does is sample the TV signal input, and place it into the RAM of a VGA output device.

If you use a PCI TV card in direct-feed mode, straight into the graphics card's overlay, then lag is as minimal as it gets.
Use any advanced multiple-frame deinterlacers and/or motion compensation algorithms, and obviously you'll have a lag of multiple frames.

I'm regularly playing FAST games fed through a TV card onto the big monitor, no problem there. My viewing software lets me choose what kind of image enhancement I want - including "just deinterlace", which is just one semi-frame behind the action.

 

[YOyoYOhowsDAjello]

Originally posted by: Peter
What do you think is the TV box doing differently than a TV card would? Answer: Not much. What either solution does is sample the TV signal input, and place it into the RAM of a VGA output device.

If you use a PCI TV card in direct-feed mode, straight into the graphics card's overlay, then lag is as minimal as it gets.
Use any advanced multiple-frame deinterlacers and/or motion compensation algorithms, and obviously you'll have a lag of multiple frames.

I'm regularly playing FAST games fed through a TV card onto the big monitor, no problem there. My viewing software lets me choose what kind of image enhancement I want - including "just deinterlace", which is just one semi-frame behind the action.

What kind are you using? I've seen complaints from members in several threads about how they have tried a few TV tuner cards and have not been able to get rid of the lag issues.

 

[PorscheMaD911]

I remember using a Compro Videomate DVB-T300 or something similar around a year ago, and when combined with a program called dscaler and my PS2 had zero lag. The software that came with the card was *terribly* laggy though.

 

[imported_Truenofan]

im using a theatre 550 pro, the only lag i got, is sound, the video lag, if there is any, is very negligible at best. the sound lag is only by maybe .2 to .3 ms, it is noticable on games that are heavy sound type games(ddr, taiko, ect.)

 

[Peter]

YO, like I said (and others too), it's not a matter of the TV/video in card, but of the rendering software that uses its output.

The TV-in is digitized in realtime, using an on-chip buffer that lasts for a fraction of a video scanline. The digital stream coming from the TV-in chip is no more than a few hundred microseconds behind the "real thing" - and if your software sets it up as straight as it can be, this stream can go DIRECTLY onto the graphics card's video overlay buffer, from where it will be deinterlaced, scaled and rendered into the current (or next) outgoing display frame.

So ideally, a PC using a PCI TV-in card and direct-to-overlay rendering is no more than a frame behind, and it cannot technically get better ... it can get infinitely worse though, depending on how many "image enhancement" software stages are inbetween, and how sophisticated they are. Things like "4D" or "multiframe" deinterlacers and image enhancers obviously introduce multiple frames of lag; "timeshift" approaches that buffer the video onto the HDD even introduce multiple SECONDS of lag, totally unusable for any kind of gaming.

No matter whether you use a PC TV-in solution or "just" a modern, digitally working LCD TV, you'll always have to look for a lag-minimizing software setting. Samsung's LCD TVs for example have a "game" mode that does just that - turn off all the image enhancing software trickery and just get the picture onto the screen as quickly as possible.