Page 1 of TV on PC

I have 20" Philips LCD monitor which is really disappointing when I try to use it as a TV, streaming is awful, and retail DVD`s come to think of it.

Simple question: is it the cheap graphics card I have or is crap rendering of TV pictures the norm for LCD monitors not designed to be tv`s? I think mine is 8ms response, and generally a fairly good spec 1280x1024, no DVI though. Graphics card is PCI-e Saphire Radeon 300 with 128mb (ATi). PC is AMD 64 3200+ with 1.5Gig of RAM.

Thoughts welcome?

Can you explain exactly what you mean by "awful". I mean, is the picture jerky or are you getting overscan?

Analog TV from the PC to the TV is going to be worse than a dedicated TV tuner because the analog signal has to be digitised before being sent to the TV. If you connect to your TV via analog (such as D-sub) then the digitised picture is then further converted back to analog.

DVD playing and digital media (such as freeview tuners and mpg files) shouldn` be a problem which is why I ask for further explanation of how awful your picture is.

OK, took another look at this last night and can report that retail DVD playback through Neroshowcase is fine. Problem is live TV (streaming), e.g. BBC World Cup coverage. I`ve also tried other streaming sites (including prem football ones) and all have same issue. Picture is just about watchable when in a small window (say 6x6 inch) but when picture is stretched everything becomes blurred and any movement exagerates this blurring. Full screen size it is absolutely awful and unwatchable. Perhaps its bandwidth or compression or something else?

Bearing in mind you comments re. analogue to digital conversion I`ll give my neighbours Pinnacle USB Freeview dongle a go and see how that looks.

PS I have 2meg broadband connection.

Would a better graphics card improve the situation, or is the graphics card not really relevant?

Sounds to me like you have no problem at all. What you`re desribing is normal. Streaming vid like that is low quality so you can download it and watch it in real time as it happens. For example if you want to stream a hi def trailer from apple, that will download part of it then let you start to watch the beginning while it gets the rest cos the size is big. Football however that would be no good `cos you`d be behind.

You will see the same effect if you download a small movie trailer, watch it in a little window, looks OK, make full screen looks bad. That won`t be as bad as streaming live tv.

Alan

www.admars.co.uk

Basically, it is as admars said. The live streaming TV has to be heavily compressed in order to be sent over the internet and buffered for acceptable viewing. However, today`s internet speeds are pretty quick so that much compression is way too high and is totally inadequate by today`s standards. It could be that the website offering the streaming video is old and has yet to improve its streaming service.

You are not going to get better picture quality with a better graphics card. The graphics card cannot add what isn`t there. As you suspected it is heavily compressed and a lot of information is lost. There is nothing you can do short of contacting the people of that website.

I didn`t think your DVD playback would be a problem and you should find you will receive an excellent picture with the Freeview stick, particularly if you have connected your PC to your Philips screen digitally.

thanks, I appreciate you both taking time out - basically don`t expect much in terms of quality, and certainly don`t waste money on a better graphics card because it won`t affect it.