Svideo or Coax from Satellite to AIW Radeon 8500

[rtacadena]

Which hookup would give me the best quality capture, hooking up my satellite reciever to my AIW Radeon 8500 with RG-6 coax or hooking up with an SVideo cable?

I'm doing it right now with coax and the captured video looks kind of soft. I've seen other people's captures where it looks really sharp. I'm going thru Dish Network and have a signal strength of 124 and 110 on sat1 and 2 respectively. Is a soft picture normal? TIA

[medievil]

Svideo, Coax loses to much in the transfer where as Svideo will give a much sharper image.

[snowmoon]

Satellite is mpeg-2 so it contains a seperate color channel that is diftinct and un-mingled with the luminence of the picture. Coax will merge these two channels and there will be loss of picture fidelidy, color reproduction, and other NTSC artifacts. S-Video keeps the color and luminence seperate and therefore will be more true to the source.

Now, sometime with satellite the compression artifacts are so bad that the softening and color artifacts of coax will improve the "watchability" of satellite.

[rtacadena]

okay, kewl... how about composite vs svideo? The ati card has svideo, composite or coax. Should i still stick with svideo?

[rtacadena]

Okay I tried the svideo cable. This made a world of difference with my captures. I then tried the composite cables and didn't see much change. I couldn't tell the difference. Does anyone know which one is the better one to use? Thanks

[3dcandy]

S-Video - as said above, S-video keeps things seperate, the coax and/or
composite merges them...

[medievil]

The misconception that composite will not improve the quality ios wrong.
Composite carries the exact same resolution and levels as Svideo. The reason some say that it is of lower quality is because some capture cards are very bad at filtering and let the color bleed over into the luminace circuit. A good Capture card and good cables will let compostie yeild as good a capture as Svideo.
To the original poster, if you can't see a differece between the Composite and svideo cap's then stick with svideo (Since you already have the hook up)

[snowmoon]

Merging and unmergine the color singal is not a 100% reversable action even under the best situation. Some color/luminence changes are just not physically possible with that modualtion.