Question about TV-Out

[mattg1981]

You know how some video cards have TV-Out so you can output your computer screen onto a bigger television. Well I have never done it, but I have a capable card. At any rate, I heard that if you do this, because of the poor resolution on the TV, it basically looks like crap and it is pointless to do this.

Well I just bought a big screen tv with HDTV capabilites. Does this make any difference as to the resolution of the TV? Will the HDTV capabilites make it look better than a regular tv or will it still look really bad on the TV?

And another thing, what is the cable called that you would need to run from the computer to the TV?

Thanks

 

[Un4gIvEn1]

it's an S-Video cable. Of course it would look alright on an HDTV. I am not quite sure how good it would look, but it's worth the $10 for the S-video cable

 

[Herkalees]

It will look better on your new HDTV than it would on a non-HDTV because all HDTV's have built in line doublers, which, well, doubles the quantity of horizontal lines, therefor making them less visible and the picture sharper...

Now comparing your HDTV to a monitor... I have no idea.


(Hometheater is my occupation)

 

[Duke Zootin]

It will still look like crap.

The problem is the interface. I assume your video card has either a single RCA type video out, or S-Video out. Both of them only provide 480 interlaced lines of resolution (standard analog TV interface). Even on an HDTV, using the built-in line doubler, the input signal is too poor at 480i to create a sharp picture. You will be forced to run a desktop at 800x600 or less just to make the text legible. You really need 720 progressive lines (lowest HDTV standard resolution) minimum for nice readable text.

For gaming it's pretty cool, since small text usually isn't an issue. But for web and other text tasks, it's kinda rough going.

BTW, I have personally tried it. I have a networked PC serving audio files to my A/V system. I found it difficult to read file names and such on the main HDTV screen and wound up incorporating a "14 monitor into the system. Makes it much easier to build music playlists and such.

There are new video cards out capable of higher resolution video out, but I've never tried any so I can't vouch for any of them.

One last issue, you didn't say what kind of HDTV you have, but if it's a projection set of any kind you need to be very carefull about screen burn. A static image of a PC desktop can burn into a projection set in a short amount of time.

Dukey

 

[oakland]

guys you got to try this!!!

Guys I do it on both HDTV monitor and Regular anolog 4:3 61" Big screen, both being RPTV's. Now I am running a Crapy (JMHO) NVIDA Geforce2 card with Svideo out. I could not get the thing to work well with either TV no matter what latest driver NVIDA released including their latest driver and using 768X576 or 720x480. Now these resolutions are key if you want to watch DVDs or any type of TV programs for that matter. These are the resolution you need to "fill" the screen. Some games even work at these resolutions very well. Any way bla bla bla, the key is this program, TVTOOL . It is only 11 bucks author considers it a donation and it is well worth it. Yes there are cracks availible but they do not work well at least not for me :>). So anyway this program allows you to fill the screen and allows you to tweak the output to give you , well a very very good picture!! Try it and let me know... :happy:

BTW: you can find the program @ http://tvtool.info/index_e.htm