Report: DVD on your TV with a PC – Tips for TV-Out (3/9) GeForce 2 MX with TwinView
A unique feature among NVIDIA's chips is the MX's TwinView functionality, which lets you activate a second output on your card. You'll find a card with almost any kind of output combination: 2 Monitors (Analog and/or digital), Monitor and TV-Out , or both (Dual Monitor and TV-Out), as offered by Leadtek. The TV-output of these TwinView cards is activated through a separate control panel in the driver menus. You can find it in the advanced display options (right click on your desktop->properties->settings->advanced). Now select the "clone" mode. This is a setting that doesn't require you to restart your system (under Win98). If you left-click on the monitor symbol subtitled 2, another menu will open, which will let you choose your resolution and select your output device (PAL for Europe and NTSC for US/Japan).
Although you're now using the very comfortable DualView mode, you'll still find the black frame around the picture on your TV. Unfortunately, the shareware "TV-Tool" that we'll get to later in the article is of no help to us here, since it is a little bit tricky with the MX chipset. The good news is that NVIDIA is thoughtful enough to ship a tool of its own, called "NVIDIA Full Screen Video Mirror Control", which is quite similar to Matrox' DVD MAX. You can find the file, NVFSVM.EXE, hidden in the windows/system folder or in the temporary folder to which the NVIDIA drivers were unpacked prior to installation.
For quicker access I suggest putting a link to it on your desktop (right-click on your dektop -> new -> shortcut...) This tool let's you adjust your image size to fill the entire screen independently of your monitor settings. You can even Zoom in on the picture or change the ratio between 4:3 and 16:9. The program will remember your settings, so you won't be forced to readjust or start it every time you restart your computer. Testing with the newer versions of the software DVD players PowerDVD and WinDVD uncovered a weakness of this otherwise quite helpful tool. Although it displayed MPEG and AVI files full screen without a hitch and without the frame, it refused to show any DVD videos. No matter which player was used, the TV screen would always remain completely black. Not even tools like DVD Genie helped. Since they played MPEG and AVI files, this leads me to the conclusion that it isn't the DVD players that are at fault, but that there is a problem with implementation of the DVD overlay modes in the tool. PowerDVD's diagnosis tool helped me reach this conclusion: All tests run in YUY2, UYVY and YV12 modes or with BOB enabled failed, while those run at HALF were shown on the TV using the tool. A possible explanation for this can be found in NVIDIA's driver documentation:
Another lack of the NVIDIA tool is that it lets you see fulsscreen video on your TV but it does not fix the black frames in the normal desktop mode. Conclusion: With the currently available drivers, MX TwinView cards are a rather problematic choice for watching DVDs on your TV, since the black frame can't be eliminated that easy. A bit disappointing... Hopefully NVIDIA will be able to address this issue in future drivers, and looking back on what the driver team has achieved in the past year, there's a pretty good chance that will happen. By the way, DivX ;-) worked without any problems with Video Mirror. I'm currently awaiting an answer from NVIDIA, but I'll keep you posted. I tested using driver releases v6.31 and v6.49. The tool isn't included in the newest "leaked" v7.xx releases anymore, so I couldn't test with them. UPDATE: After updating WinDVD to v2.3.55, TV-output works with the Nvidia Tool and my MX cards. You can grab the patch here: WinDVD Patch auf v2.3.55 - Trial Version des Players. You still get black borders, though. I also got a few mails stating that TV-Tool works with MX cards if you enable the standard TV-Out through TV-Tool instead of using the TwinView feature. (TwinView needs to be deactivated for this to work!) During testing my Hercules GeForce 2 MX DualVideo was rather fickle, though, and started making trouble sometimes as soon as DualView was activated within TV-Tool. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't. I couldn't find a pattern, so I guess it's also part luck... Just be prepared to experiment... More on TV-Tool later in this article. UPDATE2: I received reports that TwinView & Video Mirror runs with Overscan when playing a DVD with the new PowerDVD version v3.0. IŽll try that. (Trial Version) |
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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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