I'm wanting to plug a PS2 into my computer. Every thing works, I can play the game fine. The issue is with the video quality compared to what I would get from playing it on a normal TV. I'm using KDETV at full screen on a openSUSE 11.0 system. I need to know why I'm getting a crappy video quality. Do I need better hardware, or can I optimize the settings for better quality? If it's a hardware quality issue would finding a better card due, or are all TV tuners crappy compared to a regular TV? This is my first TV tuner and my only experience dealing with this kind of hardware.

The core problem is most likely the fact you are blowing up an NTSC image (640x480) to the resolution of your display by playing the game full-screen. If you resize the KDETV window down to 640x480 and it looks good, then that is the problem.

If it looks poor even at it's native resolution, then it could be a software issue or just poor hardware.

It does seem to look better the smaller I make the window. Is there any way to increase the resolution? Or is that fixed based on the hardware I have?

I have an analogue tv card in my computer which I've just got working in debian. I had a few problems and ended up installing both kdetv and tvtime. For some reason, the picture quality using kdetv is not as good as using tvtime (there are wavy lines in kdetv, in tvtime it is a perfect picture). Maybe trying an alternative viewer might help?

(There were also several "warning" messages when I ran kdetv from a terminal in verbose mode - but I have no idea whether that is significant, and because tvtime is good, I don't plan on troubleshooting further.)

Regular broadcast Tv (in the US) is broadcast ntsc, which is 720X480. Now if your computer monitor is 1280x1024 and you blow you TV tuner signal up to full screen. you are stretching the original signal. Now take a look at a jpg file that looks fine when it is 2x2 size, then zoom in a few times (look crappy like your signal?). What you can do is reset your monitor resolution to 720x480 (800x600 would be close enough) and see if that looks better. If it does not then it is probably bad hardware.

If you just want to use the computer monitor it would probably be cheaper and better quality just to get an adapter, skipping the computer altogether.

I've tried it in kdetv, tvtime and the windows software that came with it (after a quick reboot into windows). My problem is I cheaped out and bought a crappy card. I guess you do get what you payed for. Here's my card. http://www.leadtek.com/eng/tv_tuner/...lineid=6&act=2

Next card I get will be HDTV and I'll make sure to get one with it's own chip for video processing. I'll also keep an eye on its resolution capability. I know more about TV tuners now then when I bought this card.

Take a look at the HDHomerun. It is a dual digital tuner (no analog) that works over Ethernet. You access it over a stream with VLC or whatever. It takes all the video processing out of your box and it allows you to access both turners from any computer on your network. It will also work on cable tv with unencrypted QAM channels(same channels a Dtv would get without a decoder box).

Beware of lag, though. Note that he wants to connect a video game system--a Playstation 2. If a tuner encodes to MPEG and introduces a .5 second lag, then that's unacceptable.

The lag thing is true, I do not think it will be .5 second though. The other thing I did not think of was, can the PS2 produce a digital Tv signal. I would be a little surprised if it does. It would definitely be something to find out before switching to a digital tuner.

No, the PS2 has no digital video capability; you would need to bump up to the PS3 for that. Even then, the HDHomeRun is not designed to connect to anything but digital TV over coax, it doesn't support HDMI.

Be aware that true HD capture devices are still very expensive. It wouldn't be worth it to just play games over, you would be better off with a VGA box that accepts the component video output of the PS2. But it will never look very good on a LCD monitor, as the PS2 doesn't output in high enough resolution.

Considering I don't watch much TV any more I decided to get rid of my normal TV a while back. Then I decided I wanted to be able to get TV signals just in case I needed to see any breaking news or weather reports. But I also didn't want a big TV taking up shelf space and collecting dust especially when I was hardly going to use it. That's when I decided to get a TV tuner. The fact that I can plug in consoles into it is just an added bonus but not the main reason I got the tuner. TV stations will be switching to digital in the US in the early part of 2009.

I also have plans on building a HDTV Linux PVR. The goal is to build a computer system that can replace all the hardware in my living room. This way I have full control over hardware and software upgrades. I want all my stuff in a small efficient microATX sized case. I'm highly allergic to dust. So I've become obsessive about making every room efficient as possible to keep every thing clean and dust free.

When I do build this thing I'll probably be taking a look at LinuxMCE which from the google video I've seen looks more professionally done then MythTV.