Since the recent death of my philips DVP642 (after the relatively standard 1 year mark), I've been considering doing away with DVD players completely and going with some sort of HTPC solution. A very very low end, bare bones HTPC solution. I'm not shooting for the moon here. A big part of the impetus to cut DVD players out of the picture is my desire not to shell out another $40 for one. My present setup is pretty crappy, and I'm hoping to match that quality. I've got an ancient 19" sharp CRT TV with only coaxial input. In order to watch DVDs in the past I had to go from my DVD Player (RCA cable) > VCR (RCA) and then VCR (Coaxial) > TV. From everything I've read, this is one of the worst setups to have, but, without buying new equipment, it's the only setup option I had and for my ancient TV, the picture quality seemed more than acceptable. I have a fairly mediocre low end video card on a reasonable fast (AMD 4000+) PC: Leadtek GeForce 7300GS 256MB PCIe That happens to have s-video out. I've seen s-video to RCA cables for sale at electronics stores. Has anyone had experience with these? Will an s-video to rca cable match the dvd player to vcr to tv quality I was getting before? Is there anything else (other than sound) that I need to consider?
from the wording of your message, i suspect your sensible with your cash. I am right in thinking you're suggesting to do HTPC > VCR > TV? s-video does offer better quality than composite RCA, but the differences between them arent a lot when involved in the set up you describe, as you are then sending them along a RF coaxial cable to the TV. Sound wise you just need a 3.5mm > 2x RCA out of the HTPC into the VCR...
