I have many movies in Divx/Xvid and other digital files on my PC that I want to watch on my TV screen, so I don't have to keep burning them onto discs. I don't know what to buy to do this, my video card has two outputs on it, one to plug the monitor in and the other is S-Video. However, my TV only has Coax and RCA. I went to radio shack looking for a type of plug to convert S-video to RCA but they told me they don't exist. I'm sure people have done this before, I just need a little help getting started. My TV is only about 10 feet away from my PC so wiring isnt a problem.
don't go to Radio Shack for support, the people there barely know how to tie their shoes. You can easily connect a composite-only input device to a device with only svideo output. Basically you need to combine the crominance and luminance signals from svideo into one signal (hence the name composite) If you are technically skilled you can build one http://www.epanorama.net/circuits/svideo2cvideo.html or you can just buy the adapter for a few bucks http://www.pcpartscollection.com/svidtocomad.html
Yeah it can be done. There is a difference though when going from s-video TO composite as opposed to going from composite TO s-video. the difference is in splitting the y/c signal or combining. But the adapters for either do exist. The more costly of the two are those that adapt a composit output to s-video from what I read. A lot of vid cards have a 9 pin s-video port as oppossed to the 4 pin ones on vcr's and tv's. Why? I don't know because I also read that it doesn't matter- the extra pins aren't needed for tv but perhaps in some dual monitor pc setups. My ati card came with an s-video to composite adapter, luckly.
adapters for svideo to composite are cheap because you just combine the crominance and luminance channels and put a cap on it. adapters for composite to svideo are more expensive because they require a small circuit to separate the signals combined in composite into separate y/c (luminance and chrominance)
