The picture quality on the tv out of my Geforce 5200 is kind of bad for 2 reasons.
The first is kind of hard to explain. Its like there is a ghost picture of water ripples continually flowing from the bottom left-hand corner of my tv set to the top right conner. The ripples are very straight and are completely regular, which makes me think that the distortion isn't interference in the s-video cable, but rather a problem with my Geforce 5200 (wiggling the cable doesn't change the distortion). On the other hand, sometimes the ripples gradually reverse and start moving in the exact opposite direction.

My other problem is that I can sometimes see a vertical line moving from the bottom of the screen to the top of the screen when I'm watching a movie with a lot of motion in it. I'm almost sure that it's a refresh line because it looks like below the tv is displaying a new frame, and above it it is displaying an old frame. Or maybe it's the other way around, it moves so fast it's hard to tell. Anyway I was wondering, is it possible for me to up the refresh rate on my tv or something to make the line invisible or something? I would just start messing with the rates, but I've heard one can break one's tv that way. Here's a piece of my xorg.conf:

Section "Monitor"
Identifier "Monitor1"
HorizSync 30-50
VertRefresh 60
EndSection

If I'm not explaining this thoroughly, let me know and I'll try to post a picture of my tv screen.


Any help would be much appreciated, Jared

Ok i know this is a very shitty answer and im not being an ass i swear.

Join the club.
Nvidia has a horrid tv-out even in windows.
not entirely nvidia's fault more like the multiple manufactures.

You can probably fix the line with an option to specify NTSC for US televisions or PAL for others.

I see. Oddly enough I'm kind of relieve to learn that my card's tv-out looks bad because it is bad. Otherwise, I'd feel compiled to try and fix it. Also considering I only paid $30 for the card, I'm satisfied with the picture quality. The ATI card's S-video I had before I bought this one wasn't even supported in linux.

Thanks for the info

I finally figured out what the ripple interference was. It wasn't the video card's problem it was a electrical problem. It would seem that somehow electricity was flowing from my wall into my computers case, through the s-video line, through my tv, and back out my coaxial cable line hooked up to my tv. so basically my computer was grounding it's self via the s-video cable. What's really odd is that even with some miscellaneous electricity flowing through my cable line, I still got good reception. I still see the refresh line every once in a while but it's not nearly as bad as the ripple interference.