Video-in card with GOOD quality?
 

I just wasted $50 on a new Hauppauge WinTV card.

A few years ago a neighbor of mine gave me a Hauppauge WinTV TV capture card. It was PCI, and not the greatest quality. Watchable, but nothing even close to the quality of even a normal television set.

Today I decided I would like to play X-Box and watch TV on my new 20.1'' widescreen LCD, but wanted something with quality that would look good enough to take advantage of my monitor's high quality. So I went out to buy the newest version of the WinTV card, assuming the quality has much improved in the last 3 years. I was wrong. The image quality looks IDENTICAL to the old one. What a waste of $50. At least it now comes with a remote control...

Anyway my question is, does anybody know of a video-in card that has exceptional image quality? Something as close to possible as the real deal on a television? All I need is a video composite plug (the yellow one), and don't necessarly need the RF. Is it even possible to get that good of video quality through PCI, USB, or anything else? I don't even need one that can record...just something to view it on my screen in a resizable window (so I can do other stuff on my computer at the same time)

If not, then is there a device that simply converts video composite or RF into something that I can plug my monitor straight into (VGA or DVI)?


Thanks guys. By the way, do you think CompUSA will take my opened and installed WinTV card back?

Make sure you uninstall ALL old drivers and get the NEWEST POSSIBLE drivers form the site.

The thing is, TV quality IS amazingly low. The NTSC format is 640x480, and when you blow that up on your 20" LCD, it's going to look like crap. It's not that the devices are poor, it's that TV is poor. HD is much better--you might be able to get the HD add-on for your XBox and an HD-TV tuner card. Even so, HD won't fill your whole screen, you'll have to blow that up too, and so suffer some quality loss.

You're right...I never even thought of that. And that makes sense, because if I scale the window down to about 640x480, it looks great. I did know that TV had much lower resolution than monitors do, I guess I just hadn't realized it would make that huge of a differance. Also the problem is that I am sitting so close to the monitor screen, where as you would sit further back from a TV so it would look better even though it's on a larger screen.

Thanks a lot for the help :)

damn...so there's no good way to get good looking TV to you PC screen?