S-Video output on my ATI card, is it worth using?

Jongamer · Post by **Jongamer** » Wed Sep 10, 2008 2:08 pm

I have a ATI Radeon 8500.

I don't want to use my small computer monitor to watch my anime, and my Xbox is on the fritz at the moment and don't feel like messing with it.

What I want to do is buy a really long S-video cable and run it from my computer to my TV so I can watch my Anime on my computer, on my TV.

Though there comes the issue of quality.

As long as it looks like a Standard 480i picture, I will be just fine, I just wanted to ask before I went out and bought a $10-$15 cable that is gonna give me a horrid picture.

So would it be worth it?

Aguiluz · Post by **Aguiluz** » Wed Sep 10, 2008 2:19 pm

I have done this in our Condo unit in Regalia Towers.

So, on the 32nd floor is our unit. I brought along my laptop (broken CCFL inverter), an S-Video cable, an Audio cable, a Keyboard and a PS1 controller hooked up to a parallel port. I used an open access point for internet.

I have a 32 inch CRT TV.

On 800x600, I can browse GMail (At large letters), read Engadget (Large letters), play Youtube videos (fullscreen), play DVDs (fullscreen) and play GBA Emulators at acceptable quality.

1024x768 is just too blurred!

Worth my $1.25 S-Video cable!

project_failure · Post by **project_failure** » Wed Sep 10, 2008 2:38 pm

It will work fine. Enjoy big screen anime.

Jongamer · Post by **Jongamer** » Wed Sep 10, 2008 3:44 pm

Ok now for some reason, WMP refuses to display the video on my TV. It would just be a very Dark purple/Black box where the video should be.

EDIT: Fixed, it turns out WMP only outputs the Video to the main display, so I just switched the Main Display to the TV, now it works.

EDIT 2: Yeah I just wish now that I could clone my desktop to my TV with 640x480 for my TV, and 1280x1024 for my computer.

But NOOOoooooooo it has to be the same resolution, the only way I can have 2 different resolutions is if I extend the desktop to the TV, and then I can't scale the video properly to fit the lower resolution, and using the ATI Catalyst software where I get theater mode on the TV, and normal on the computer monitor my computer will run like crap since it is a 1GHz P3 and is trying to display the movie on 2 screens.

So I have to have my TV as the main display so the video to appear on the TV, and have the computer monitor as the secondary.

So it looks like I am stuck switching between resolutions manually.

I hope that all made sense.

Other than that, the video looks just like it normally would on a 640x480i TV.

EDIT 3: Now my computer isn't running slow in theater mode, weird.

Seems all good, just kinda cuts off some of the video, as long as I can read all the caps I should be fine.

Aguiluz · Post by **Aguiluz** » Wed Sep 10, 2008 9:32 pm

As long as it works, it's a winner all around!

zzattack · Post by **zzattack** » Sun Sep 14, 2008 7:02 am

s-video is pretty watchable yeah, but I've found that it depends mainly on the TV youre using

Jongamer · Post by **Jongamer** » Sun Sep 14, 2008 10:53 am

zzattack wrote:s-video is pretty watchable yeah, but I've found that it depends mainly on the TV youre using

yeah it has been working nicely, now I am gonna pretty much use it for Emulators, cause I finally got my Xbox working again.