I'm using a S-video cable to connect my laptop (ATI radeon mobile card) to my TV. My laptop has a 7 pin S-video connector while my TV has a 4 pin connector. The problem I'm trying to resolve is that the video quality when watching movies is somewhat poor, I get these flickering horizontal lines of brighter and darker areas floating down my TV screen and I'm wondering how to improve the quality. The cable I'm using is a pretty cheap standard S-video 4 pin cable, and I was wondering if getting a better cable with more bells and whistles would improve my signal. I've tried multiple cables of the same type to eliminate cable malfunction, and I've tried using a SCART adapter which only renders the image in B&W which I'm told is normal, but still shows the same problem as through the S-video connector, so it doesn't seem to be a problem with the port itself being damaged. Thanks in advance for any help.
You dont say but it sounds like you are connecting to a standard CRT Telly. PC display on these is always crap. Why do you think PC's come with a Monitor? Most Modern flatscreen tv's have the approriate connections for PC input such as D-SUB or DVI. In this case your picture would be fine.
Well, I've seen others with comparative equipment to myself been able to set it up without the disturbances I'm getting. Do you think getting a more expensive cable that advertises with less signal loss would make a difference at all, or is that more for the hardcore tech geeks?
Well, its an analogue cable and analogue signals will suffer from poor quality cables. Its only digital cables like HDMI that either work or they dont (a bit like on or off and not poor to very good). From experiance i connected a CRT TV via S-Video once and although i didn't have the problem you describe I found that any Text was barely legible particularly with web browsing. I was advised that this was a generic problem with connecting a PC to a CRT tv due to the limitations in resolutions possible from such a TV. I now have a 32"LCD connected via VGA cable just like a monitor and the picture looks very good, but still not as good as a dedicated monitor. The difficulty is matching the native resolution of the screen on your graphics card. I and many others struggle with the same problem so the TV will scale the image to fit the display. Therefore, with a CRT telly you are at an even worse starting point to acheive what you want. Spend the money on a cable if you wish, but I reckon you will be dissapointed even if you get rid of the image problems you have.
Just found something else that might help on the Nvidia website as copied below "Poor Quality S-Video Output on Some TVs" NVIDIA drivers differentiate an S‐video TV from a composite TV by searching for 75‐Ohm loads on the chrominance and luminance lines. If the driver detects only one such load, it assumes that it has a composite TV and drives both chroma and luma onto that line. This approach allows both types of TV to display in color. Unfortunately, some S‐video TVs do not apply the correct load to both lines, causing the driver to detect an S‐video TV as a composite. The driver, in turn, sends the lower quality signal to the S‐video TV. To work around this problem, use the Control Panel to override the Auto‐select feature. This can be done following these steps: 1 In the Settings tab of the Display Properties Control Panel, click Advanced. 2 In the nView tab, click Device Settings and click Select Output Device. 3 In the Device Selection tab, click the TV option. 4 Change the Video output format to S‐video.
