I just bought an ATI All In Wonder 8500DV from CompUSA for $149 - $20 rebate = $129. I built my self a TiVo gaming PC for my big screen TV in my living room. Which is (currently) a ECS K7S5A Pro mobo, AMD Athlon XP2100+, 512mb PC2100 ram, 45gb IBM HD, AIW 8500DV. (oh and Windows XP Sp1)

I setup MMC v.7.7 which came with my AIW card, updated the Catalyst drivers from the ATI website, and have played Unreal Tournament 2003 in "holy sh!t" mode (all details maxed out on highest) in 640x480 32bit with no problem, and on a 60" big screen its pretty cool (not near as sharp as my real monitor, but cool none the less)

So: I'm primarily capturing from DirecTV S-Video (which btw: my tv does NOT support it only has Composite in with a 3-line digital comb filter, and looks awesome. The DSS looks like a DVD, no kidding). So I ran my SVideo cable directly from the Satellite box into the input of the AIW 8500, I have captured some stuff in different resolutions including 352x240 (vcd quality), 480x480 (svcd quality) and 720x480 (dvd quality), and I can't tell the difference between ANY of them when playing them back from the computer onto the TV, they all basically look the same. The file sizes are all different, but they all look and sound the same.

Now I have several (many many many) VCD's, SVCD's, DVD's and DVD-R's. And you can VERY obviously tell the difference between them (most have been from a DVD source). My satellite looks exactly like dvd-quality on the tv. However when I capture anything from Satellite the image gets really soft (not sharp) and the colors get a little faded out, and looks nothing like any of my DVD->SVCD rips I've seen, which is kinda what I was expecting to see.

They all seem about the same quality, no matter the resolution. Can anyone here help me with this.

Is anyone else using a similar setup, and can help me solve this issue? I was expecting my captures to look like SVCD's made from DVD's. Or close enough NOT to be able to tell the difference anyway. My capture's look NOTHING like SVCD's made from a DVD source. I've got stuff (starwars trilogy) on SVCD, which was "captured" from Laserdisc that looks better than what I'm getting. (though I have no idea how they captured or what they used to capture)

I don't know if I'm expecting too much, or getting too less?????

ANY HELP/ADVICE WOULD BE MOST APPRECIATED.

BTW: I'm not a ATI guy- I'm a Nvidia guy. This is my first ATI card, and I'm not 100% sure of all the ins and outs of the settings, drivers, etc.

Toaster