Cable through my PC?

[Rob Williams]

As some of you know, I recently jumped into the HDTV world. I quickly found out though, that basic cable looks absolutely horrible. Even though it's digital cable, it's still a regular NTSC signal.

My cable company sells a replacement HDTV digital terminal, which would basically make only the HDTV channels look good, leaving the other ones to look crappy. I was curious about instead streaming the cable through the computer instead of the digital terminal, since the PC is hooked up to the TV anyway.

Does anybody know if such TV tuner cards (AIW or Happague or whatever) will make cable look good through the TV? I just basically want good looking cable TV, but it's hard to even watch because it looks so crappy.

 

[madmat]

It will be in 640x480 just stretched to fit the monitor's resolution so it still looks crappy. That's my experience with my Haupage WinFast 150 TV tuner card. I don't know how well the ATI tuner does though as I've never used one. The ATI tuner is a PCI version of the tuner from an AIW card.

I don't know if they support HDTV signals or not but you might check their site to find out.

 

[Rob Williams]

I was hoping that in this HDTV age, that I could muster more than 640*480. I know some motherboards are HDTV compatable, but I haven't looked into why that is, hehe.

I will have to browse Hauppague's website and see what they have. I know Greg has one he's playing around with, so I will have to shoot him a few questions haha.

 

[Blumen]

Avermedia has a tv tuner, albeit external that will display tv up to 1280x1024, but i'm not sure if that answers your question or not.... :/

 

[madstork91]

My comp screen as you know rob is a 32" plasma tv... the picture in picture feature gives me a lil always on top tv when ever i want and a full screen tv when ever i press the button.

 

[Rob Williams]

I didn't know Plasma screens went below 40".

 

[Lothar]

In case you're still curious...

You can go with a Hauppauge card (PVR150 for example) and tune SDTV (standard def - analog) at 640x480. Should resemble what you get already (garbage in garbage out). However, I think you might be able to use a program like ffdshow to clean it up some and upsample the resolution.

Then you get a card like the Divco FusionHDTV 5 to tune your HDTV signals. However, it will only tune unencrypted channels (Over-the-air or unencrypted channels through cable (generally what you would get over-the-air)). The HD will look very nice, and you can output it at whatever the native resolution of your tv is (it's silly to output at any other resolution because the tv will just scale it to its native resolution anyway, and you'll get a clearer picture if that's what you send it).

For more info, see http://www.htpcnews.com they have a great forum and guides for this sort of stuff.