VGA card with working widescreen 50Hz component out?

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richms

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#63998 5-Jul-2010 23:19

Cant for the life of me get it working on the one i have here - there is no 1024x576 option on the ATI drivers, I have a 720x576 which is useless since the display stretches it so its all short and fat.

Anyone know if the nvidia cards have a better TV out on them which will do it? I want to get no overscan, 1:1 mapping but in the SD or ED mode not one of the HD ones since its to go into some non HD CRT's

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sbiddle

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#348265 6-Jul-2010 06:48

What sort of cable are you using? A VGA to component cable? My understanding was these only worked with a handful of cards that supported this feature.

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#348339 6-Jul-2010 11:22

Also make sure you check the overscan in the drivers. I do not have a ATI now so cannot check but I remember spending a couple of hours trying to work out why it would not display 1:1 to find that by default the ATI drivers had overscan set at something like 50% and they setting was buried in the driver settings!

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richms

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#348467 6-Jul-2010 16:53

Am using the multipin DIN on the back as an output so it shows as a TV in the ATI drivers. It all works fine for 4:3 TV on 720x576, but that is unworkable for the widescreen since it makes the pixels non square which means either turning on 4:3 on the tv and wasting screen space or zoomng it and wasting resolution. Until I can get the right resolution output then the zoom controls are not going to help. I can use the NTSC wide mode ok, but I really would like the additional res that the PAL timing modes have.

Its just to play ustream on a couple of TVs around the place, so zoom would be tollerable, but I would rather not do it that way if a cheap preloved nvidia will do it right.

OS in that machine is windows XP because its old and I am cheap ;)

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1gkar

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#348825 7-Jul-2010 18:29

Does the ATI drivers allow a custom resolution to be set? If not, the Nvidia ones (v.196.21) do. Whether it will work via the supplied s-video>component out; who knows?

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richms

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#348901 7-Jul-2010 22:44

I can make them but it wont alow them to be set on the screen that does the TV out. I did manage to force it somehow in powerstrip and it was a flickering mess on the TV output. 576p seems to have even more issues with what modes I can get compared to 576i

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Niel

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#349217 8-Jul-2010 19:54

It is very hard to get custom modes for TV-out. This function is done by a cheap dedicated converter chip, not by the video processor.

By the way composite (not component) video is derived from s-video (small 4 pin DIN connector) so use s-video if you can.

Connecting to a CRT TV or an LCD TV? If LCD then you just need a DVI to HDMI cable ($10) and a video card with DVI. That gives you a digital connection between your PC and TV, can't get any better than that.

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richms

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#349219 8-Jul-2010 19:59

Not using composite - that looks like arse. Its going to a video splitter and also some long cables so changing to hdmi is more work than I can be bothered at the moment.

But even composite out it wont do a 1024x576 mode, just 700something x 576 which is only any use on a squarescreen.

Some older cards used the DVI plug for component with an adapter there since they had a 4 pin socket for svideo so an adapter wasnt practical on them, and I think when I had one it did widescreen 576 line output, but being an old card it will probably no coexist with a decent one.

Richard rich.ms

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#349375 9-Jul-2010 09:49

Have a look at Matrox cards perhaps.
On ATI and NVIDIA cards, forget it.