How to select an alternate output device?

[RamonFHerrera]

Note: this question has nothing to do with video acquisition/capture. I am exclusively interested in playback.

Since my PC monitor is not that great, I would like to play *.avi movies on a regular TV. I have been looking in the menus and it seems that I should choose "streaming" in order to send the video output to a video card.

My video card is a Pinnacle DV500.

The more general question is about the nature of the support for video hardware. Does the VLC Media Player discover all the video cards available and allows me to choose one? Or perhaps there is some middle layer (DirectView seems to show up here and then)?

OS: Windows XP.

TIA,

-Ramon F Herrera