TV-Out on a PC video card, however, falls well short of this mark. Even with Svideo optimized to display text it uses some odd color levels. Hours of fiddling hue and color sometimes still can't create the desired effects. By handling the MPEG processing almost entirely, the CPU is released to do other things besides properly sending video to the television. As someone with a computer next to the TV, I can tell you this is a fairly useful feature.
Ease of use is a biggie.
Once the hardware is installed, it is much easier to make a DVD play to your TV than to set up the video card to display to the TV as well. While this may seem minor, it becomes an annoyance when the video card turns off its TV-Out feature after a reboot, as most do. This may save a little money, and certainly increases choices, in the long run. If the video argument isn't convincing, maybe the audio argument will be. A sound card outputs to home theater audio, but has the same problems here as on a desktop.