Report: DVD on your TV with a PC – Tips for TV-Out (1/9)
After having been pretty much ignored for the last few years, it looks like DVD is finally beginning to get some attention in Europe. Everywhere you look you find advertisements praising the "crystal clear" sound and "ultra sharp" picture quality, vying for the buyer's attention. Most people give up the dream of having their own home cinema straightaway after a look at the price tag. The more adventurous among you may say "But hey, my PC is in the same room as my TV anyway! All I need is a DVD drive, a video card with TV-Out and a couple of cables, and I'm set!" Well, almost...
After investing your hard-earned money (not to mention energy) into your little project, you'll more than likely be disappointed. Most probably you'll stare at your 72 cm big-screen TV in disbelief, unable to comprehend why the image has been compressed to the size of portable TV's. Why? No overscan option available in the drivers! In this case, the culprit is the video card, or its drivers, to be more precise. Despite all the large print on the retail boxes triumphantly declaring the card to be TV-Out capable, most drivers are pretty sloppy work when it comes to TV output. Most manufacturers of NVIDIA cards for example only switch the NVIDIA logo in the reference release for their own, and that's that. You can still use TV-Out and adjust the picture size and position a bit, but that's about it. And don't even think about using something like DualView! Add to that the ugly black frame that will most likely "grace" the image on the TV, and you'll begin to see why I've been so hard on NVIDIA's TV-Out support. Recently, it seems that little work and even less effort have been put into this part of the otherwise nice drivers. Only a few manufacturers try to make their own solutions to fix this gap. A very bad performance! But things weren't always this way. A while back, ASUS shipped its V3800 line of cards with a driver that allowed both DualView and overscan. Inexplicably, this functionality disappeared with the advent of newer driver releases and has yet to return, even though the overscan option has finally found it's way back into the drivers. Same story with ELSA. When the Erazor X² debuted, the shipping drivers supported DualView and overscan and even some other options. But again, these seem to have disappeared in the newer driver releases. Glossary: A few programmers on the web have done what the various manufacturers' PR departments have pronounced impossible. Without any help from NVIDIA or its manufacturers, they have created some shareware and freeware tools that offer all the options and settings missing from the "big players" that make watching a DVD on your TV with the help of your PC an enjoyable pastime. There's DualView, overscan, and zoom, just to name a few. Oh, and as a bonus, some of them even allow the circumvention of Macrovision's DVD protection system... The following examples are meant as a little guide to help you watch your DVDs on your TV in optimal quality and without compromise. No black borders and no complicated software. Just a great picture and an enjoyable time. Note: All NVIDIA-related tips in this article are meant for use with NVIDIA reference drivers v6.31-v6.49 with Windows 98/ME! |
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Copyright: 19.12.2000 -
RIVA
Station 2000 - Lars Weinand URL of this Article: www.rivastation.com/tv-out_dvd_e.htm - If you want to link to it, please use this URL! :-) |
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