Video cards with TV in?

[Impetux]

I wanted to play the xbox/play station on my monitor. I tried a cheapo device from EB, but the picture was pretty.. well.. junk.

If I got a cheap, AIW card to give me TV in, would that give me a semi decent picture on the monitor, or would it not even work at all?

Any thoughts?
Thanks!

 

[Peter]

Get an even cheaper PCI TV-in card, and use its SVideo input for best quality. Or if you're just after that one purpose, get a plain PCI video-in card like Leadtek's VC100XP. It's about $50 or $30 respectively, and will follow you along despite your future graphics card updates.

 

[Todd33]

I'm not sure this is a good solution. They are made to show TV in a window, not real-time gaming full screen. They sell seperate VGA boxes for gaming consoles, this and a VGA A/B switch would work better. I'm not sure if you can avoid a lag using a TV card, it might be 1-2 secs.

 

[Peter]

The PCI TV- or video-in cards render, just like video-in functions on the graphics cards themselves, feed the uncompressed raw video stream directly into the graphics card's so called Overlay buffer. The graphics card in turn feeds this directly through its color space conversion, scaling and deinterlacing filters right onto the screen.

Sure, the TV/video grabbers can only scale down not up, so all they deliver is the original 640x480 or 768x576 of the NTSC or PAL signal. But the graphics card's rendering stage DOES scale it up to fullscreen at any resolutions.

I regularly do exactly that, with various games consoles of all generations, onto a 1400x1050 screen, with a measly Radeon 9200SE. No lag, no complaints ... other than that you'll get to see how low resolution these games consoles actually run, something you normally don't notice on the much worse tubes of TV sets. Until recently I had just a 7500LE - I swapped for the 9200SE for the sole reason that the latter does hardware deinterlacing; speed wise, the 7500LE was nowhere near too slow for this.