Bad Qual for viewing straight off the card not recording yet

[[H]'er]

Ok this might be a really bad question but I need help
I have the ati capture card. I have digital Cable.
The viewing quality is really bad. I have done the obvious. Check cable use high qual cable. Even got a digital cable booster and no change in qual. It was about 20 feet from cable box and I moved it to 3 feet thinking that was the prob but no big change. cpu is a athlon 800 with 256 ram and 20Gig HD if that matters.

[[H]'er]

any help at all?

[baseband]

Nah, it's not a bad question. I struggled with it for a while myself.

One very important thing about TV capture that doesn't get stated often enough is this: do NOT use the card's TV tuner! (I couldn't tell from your post whether you're doing this or not, but "straight off the card" from the topic leads me to believe you are) There's too way too much EMI inside a computer to get a clear picture from the internal tuner.

Run your coax in to a VCR(preferably a stereo one), and use the RCA audio and video out plugs to get the picture to your card. If your card has a mini-headphone style
plug for the audio, you can get a converter plug at Radio Shack for $5 or so.

When I did this, I left the cable hooked up to the tuner so I could switch back and forth between the video signals and see the difference. It was stunning. Like night and day. Colors were a little washed out compared to the regular TV. Raising the saturation got it close enough that the difference is negligible, at least in my opinion.

[Mirror_Image]

Try going from the S-Video out on the digital cable box to the S-Video in on the ATI card (if it has one, that is - I know the AIWs do, not sure about the TV-wonders). I've done this a couple of times to capture from the SpeedVision channel and it look stunning. You will, of course also have to run a cable for audio (S-Video jack is video only, no audio)

[[H]'er]

Thank you Guys I will try first thing tonight

[[H]'er]

My card only has Comp and Coax imput well and the sound out. What do I do now?

[Mirror_Image]

Well, if you can't do S-Video, do composite (that yellow RCA jack on the back of the digital cable box) and run that to your capture card (and run an audio cable as well, of course). Best of luck; even composite video looks better than RF!

[[H]'er]

Is composite the same as RCA? Like the one out of the VCR, is it composite?