S-Video output from a GeForce card
 

Hi, quick question -

Is a TV-out display on a normal telly generally lousy?

I've an S-vid connection coming out of a Geforce 4 MX to my TV and the image is almost devoid of colour and quite shaky. Now I'm aware that TVs can't handle anything near PC resolution or refresh rates but I'm running it as low as possible (800x600 and 60Hz respectively) and it's still pretty crappy.

It's not THAT important as this PC is mainly functioning as an MP3 server so as long as I can see Winamp playlists I'm pretty much Ok, but obviously it'd be nice to be able to use it to play games and use the internet on as well.

Any ideas/advice?

Did the same as you, thought the quality c**p, played with the
settings, gave up and put it down as a gimmick.
regards,

Used the S-video from a laptop to view DVD on a tele. Worked fine but I turned the res down to 640x480.
The image of the Windows desktop wasn't great, but should be adequate for playlist purposes.
Granted this isn't a GeForce chipset, but I wouldn't have thought that would make much difference.

I think you'll find it's your resolution setting that's causing the problem.

TV's PAL uses ~576 lines. I recall reading somewhere that you should set the nearest equivalent resolution in your PC ie VGA/640x480.

Can't remember where I read that though!

Is the output set to PAL or NTSC?, I have a geforce card but use realmagic hollywooodplus decoder card for dvd playing on a tv. There are numerous settings in that for output, i.e. pal ntsc widescreen etc, where to display etc, I didn't think pal tv's refreshed at 60hz I thought it was less nearer 50.