KnoppMyth on a 320G drive

D. Hugh Redelmeier hugh-pmF8o41NoarQT0dZR+AlfA at public.gmane.org
Thu Dec 7 03:50:06 UTC 2006


| From: Tim Writer <tim-s/rLXaiAEBtBDgjK7y7TUQ at public.gmane.org>

| Cable/connector quality, for example, can make a _big_ difference. I use a
| regular (NTSC) TV with composite (RCA) input together with a (relatively
| low end) nVidia card with TV-out. The nVidia card has only S-Video for
| TV-out but comes with an S-Video to RCA converter. With this connector, my
| picture was black and white. Replacing the nVidia connector with a high
| quality S-Video to RCA cable gave me good quality colour (as good as can be
| expected with NTSC).

Interesting.

I don't think that S-Video to RCA can be done with a simple cable.
The signals on the wires don't match.  From Len's message:

Composite (RCA): Audio channels seperated, video signal still merged.

SVideo: Audio channels seperated, video seperated into luminance
	(brightness) and the chrominance (colour).  Color components
	still merged.

Any conversion would have to involve a more complicated circuit.

Can you tell us more about how you do the conversion?



I have two video cards (in two different computers) hooked up to two
TVs.  One is an nVidia 5200 and the other is an ATI 9250.  Both have
S-Video connectors with converters to RCA.  The converters are *not*
interchangeable.

Standard S-Video connectors have 4 pins.

The ATI S-Video jack accepts 3 extra.  I would presume that the
standard 4 pins carry S-Video and the extra 3 carry composite video.

The nVidia has the standard 4 pins.  I have no idea how the nVidia
S-Video to Composite cable works.

In my unscientific testing, the nVidia's composite output was not so
hot.  I cranked the saturation control down a lot and that improved
things to the point of being watchable.  I have not done systematic
testing so this should not be considered definitive.

On the other hand, TVout from the ATI wasn't a piece of cake.  I
needed a non-standard patch to the ATI driver.
  http://megahurts.dk/rune/tv_output.html
Apparently this is too much of a hack for xorg to adopt.
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