Report: DVD on your TV with a PC – Tips for TV-Out (9/9) Summary
It verges on the unbelievable that some of the retailers get away with what they (don't) offer at a price of around DM 500.-. Even those models that are twice are expensive aren't any better, as they use the same drivers. The most common excuse is that borders are only present on European PAL TVs, since the picture has a higher resolution than NTSC. The claim is that NTSC TVs show only a minimal border. Since I don't have an NTSC TV at my disposal, I can't comment on these claims. Still, you'd think that the European PAL market is big enough that it would be in the interests of the retailers to solve this problem. Matrox and ATi have proven again and again that it is indeed possible to produce a working solution. Not to mention the developers of TVCC 2000 and TV-Tool whose developed the tools without any support! I was very disappointed by the GeForce 2 MX. Although the NVIDIA Video Tool offers a very basic version of what I expect from a driver - a scaleable TV-output - , this is still (?) the very discipline in which it fails when playing DVDs! True, you at least get a picture on your TV after updating WinDVD to version 2.3.55, but again, only with the black frame that decreases your image size. But if you do get TV-Tool to work with your MX you can get a screen-filling image and DualView (which takes a bit of experimentation). Conclusion: If this were school, Hercules, AOpen, Leadtek, even ASUS and most of the other NVIDIA manufacturers that offer TV-Out cards using only NVIDIA's reference drivers would get detention for not doing their homework or doing only parts of it. Only ELSA offers the most important settings, even though DualView only works after enabling it through a registry hack. ELSA's driver, however, is outdated, and although it offers good TV-Out functionality, the 3D part is no longer up-to-date. The user shouldn't have to compromise this way. It's time that something happened, that the features that are promised in big bold letters all over the colorful retail boxes are finally implemented "out-of-the-box", and not with third party tools and hacks. And even these unofficial methods might become useless with the next big driver release! Begs the question what people without an internet connection are supposed to do?! I guess I'll never know :-) If you've read all of this and find it too complicated or cumbersome, I suggest you go with a home player - press play, press start, finished! Watching DVDs is supposed to be relaxing, not more work. You can also get there on your PC with a few tricks - but only until the next driver update... And then there's the question of image quality. Can a PC based solution connected to the TV via TV-Out ever measure up to the standards set by stand-alone players? Well, the differences are only visible upon very close inspection, if at all. And an analog TV is a very forgiving screen. Of course, one last point in favor of the PC is always DivX ;-).... Relevant links:
I've tried to cover all the important topics. If I've forgotten anything important... You know where to find my E-Mail adress! :-) One word on MPEG2 decoder cards: I did not plan to make this article that complex and long when I started it. MPEG2 cards would fit perfect in this article but I donŽt have such a card at the moment. IŽll try to take a look on those later! Copyright 2000 - Lars "Borsti"Weinand (use this adress if you have questions/critics), 19.12.2000 ThanX to Benjamin Kraft for the great translation! |
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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! :-) |
