[mythtv-users] How I got great quality TV-out on my nVidia MX4000

[Stephen Williams]

Of course, the way to get 'optimal' TV-out from your Nvidia (or other)
card is not to use it's TV-out facilities at all and build a VGA ->
SCART converter for SDTVs (see http://www.sput.nl/hardware/tv-x.html
for example). This is only true of home-built converters, commercial
converters perform scan conversion which lowers the image quality.

Then (with the correct modeline) you _can_ just send the originally
broadcast, interlaced, stream straight to your TV. You are also
keeping the RGB signals seperate, not mixing them all together as you
do with S-video. No deinterlacing or scaling is required so you're not
losing image quality their either, or wasting CPU power.

Oh course, this does rely on you being able to capture the original
interlaced signal (i'm capturing a DVB MPEG stream, no encoder
required). If you're encoding hardware has already thrown that
information away and mixed the odd/even fields then you've already
lost the image quality. Using a VGA -> SCART converter in this case
would still give you better colour definition / sharpness, and if
you're encoding at the native resolution then no scaling is required.

I've built one of these and the result is _much_ better than the
TV-out from by Nvidia card. The image quality is even higher than from
my Sony DVB set-top-box.

Steve