I've currently got an ATI TV Wonder Pro. It displays at 640x480, which looks like **** on my 1280x1024. So, can anyone make some recommendations?

You do realize that's basically what TVs broadcast at, right?

You won't find one that runs at anything higher than 640x480 or so.

However, there are better tuners with filtering and such on them. I absolutely love my nvidia DualTV tuner.

The NTSC standard for broadcast TV in the US is 720x480, interlaced. I'm pretty sure there's no progressive that isn't HD. It just looks better on your TV because it's further away and is a low resolution display.

Hauppauge is supposed to be pretty good. High end ATI or nVidia cards are probably good, too. Just Google for reviews and make sure the specifications are adequate, you'll want one with a 10-bit decoder, or better if they have such a thing. You could get an HDTV tuner of course, where you'll get probably 720i or 720p for any broadcast or cable stations that offer HD.

I also recommend DScaler for viewing TV, regardless of which card you buy. It's advanced and not entirely user friendly, but far more powerful than any other software I've ever used, and provides a much better picture through more advanced deinterlacing. FYI, the "Greedy 2 Frame" deinterlacing method in DScaler is the best overall method as far as I remember. There must be two dozen options, but that's usually the best choice. You may have to fiddle with it a bit before you get it to smoothly play TV without a lot of CPU usage.

Edit: There's also a DScaler 5 0.0.8 alpha that's supposed to be slick.

You also don't want to use DScaler at all if you have hardware encoding and filtering on the TV tuner, like nvidia's. It's far more effective than DScaler's, and doesn't use up any CPU time.

Finally, Hauppauge isn't rated as highly as the nvidia card, and ATi is the worst.

[QUOTE=Cool Matty]You also don't want to use DScaler at all if you have hardware encoding and filtering on the TV tuner, like nvidia's.[/QUOTE]
Yeah you're probably right. I've only had lower end cards, so that's an important thing to consider.

[QUOTE=Cool Matty]Finally, Hauppauge isn't rated as highly as the nvidia card, and ATi is the worst.[/QUOTE]
I have an ATI TV Wonder VE, and it's pretty poor, but the high end ones are supposed to be pretty decent, although probably not the best value.

I got stuck on Avermedia's Studio cards a few years ago, Ive bought 4 of them so far, plus a few cheap Hauppauges.

For software, xawtv > *.