What TV to choose to watch Divx and Xvid movies from my computer?

Yes with a 2-port video switch. But it's better if you have a dual-head display card. If your computer has an AGP or PCI Express slot, you could use one of these. My ATI Radeon has 2 x d-sub and 1x s-video outputs and cost $40

About 2 - 3 metres.

Video is always better on a good CRT, using identical inputs. S-video is definitely worse than RGB which is what we are talking about with a vga d-sub cable. I would say the LCD video with d0sub input will look better.

For the price of a vga switch and vga cable you could buy a DVD player with mpeg file and mpeg4 (divx xvid mpeg) capability & burn the material. That's what I do.

Yes my old ATI Radeon 7000 could have for example 1600x1200 on display

1 and 1024x768 on display 2. Display 2 could be D-SUB or s-video.

It should do. SAMSUNG LE-26R41 has D-SUB input.

There is a software called Powerstrip which can help you to use resolutions not officially supported by your display card. With PowerStrip you can make a 1366x768 resolution, in fact there is one pre-configured that may work.

See here

There is a forum too

These pages may be good to read

And to you my friend.

With my ATI Radeon 7000, for clone mode I think you needed the same resolution setting for both monitor outputs. If not, then if the secondary display was smaller, it would just show the top left hand corner of the primary display.

But if I had my PC monitor at 1600x1200 and my TV at 800x600, the display driver had a feature to make, by a keypress, a running program snap to one monitor or the other.

(Most dual head cards will come with a software CD and there will usually be some "helper" programs to do multimedia stuff.)

So if I wanted to watch a movie on the TV I would start playing it in Windows Media Player or (better) Inmatrix Zoom Player, press the keys to snap it to the secondary display, then make the media player's keypress to choose full screen. Then the keypress for pause until i am ready. The program knows the secondary display size is 800x600 and fills the screen. Zoom player is good because you can use the arrow keys to move the display to centre it on yourTV.

There was a setting in the display driver called "theatre mode" which is connected with this.

Most dual head cards will allow you to do this.

An ATI radeon 9000 should do this. Mine was only a 7000 and it was OK. Even though my radeon 7000 was an AGP card.

Best regards too Michael

Yes. Personally I do not like LCD displays for watching movies or TV. Too many orange faces, and poor contrast.

That is correct.

I do not know.

You can get dsub to RGB SCART adapters though.

Also from me.

What is a maximum lenth of a d-sub cable?

over 10m if you use quality cable. somewhat dependant of the scan rate and resolution.

usually, yes.

--

Bye.
   Jasen

CRT with some kind of RGB input is preferable to s-video.

Reason:

(1) S-video is encoded. It is not much better than composite video.

S-Video is commonly used in USA, Canada, Australia and Japan, found there on consumer TVs, DVD players, video tape recorders and game consoles. Almost all TV-out connectors on graphics cards are S-Video, even in Europe, where the standard failed to make a significant impact due to the preference of the higher-quality RGB signal.

Due to the separation of the video into brightness and colour components, S-Video is sometimes considered a type of component video signal, although it is also the most inferior of them, quality-wise, being far surpassed by the more complex component video schemes (like RGB). What differentiates S-Video from these higher component video schemes is that S-Video carries the colour information as one signal. This means that the colours have to be encoded in some way.

(2) S-video does not support progressive scan

(3) Some particularly cheap S-Video cables are notorious for degrading the signals considerably, when transmitted across more than 5 meters.

The R, G and B signals are already at the correct level and do not need alteration. However the H and V sync signals are combined

A VGA (D-sub) to SCART adapter contains a circuit which takes VGA signals and converts it to RGB + composite sync signal which can be fed to TV via SCART connector. VGA card picture components RED, GREEN and BLUE are already at the correct voltage level (0.7Vpp) and has correct impedance (75 ohm) for direct connection to correspondign inputs in the TV. What needs to be done is to combine separate horizonal and vertical sync signal from VGA card to one composite sync signal which is feed to TV video in pin in SCART connector. This sync signal conversion is done by the electronics in the circuit. The circuit has also sends correct level signal to the TV RGB input enabling control pin in the SCART connector (pin 16).

Example is the Guillemot VGA-to-TV Converter.

Note that 100Hz TVs only operate at 100Hz for interlaced standard definition signals. You won't find any CRT HDTVs that can display 1080i HDTV at 100Hz, nor will you find any that can display 720p natively, never mind 1080p: the horizontal scan frequency is too high. This is why the progressive scan mode on 100Hz TVs operates is 50Hz. (The scan rate for 100Hz interlaced standard definition signals, 50Hz progressive scan standard def signals, and 1080i is actually quite similar, which is why TVs that support them can be manufactured at reasonable cost.)

It seems so, yes.

Many PCI cards are still produced because macintosh has PCI slot.

Radeon 9200 is available in both AGP and PCI bus configurations. Has dual integrated display controllers to drive two displays simultaneously with independent resolutions and refresh rates.

Example: ATI RADEON 9250 DMS59 128MB PCI DUAL VGA

If PCI card is single head, you will have to disable any on-motherboard graphics output first. Then the TV will become the computer display.

If it is dual head then you can show divx in second display and control computer in first display.

by today's standards:-

(1) slow CPU (2) small memory

Still probably OK for divx video if nothing else running on PC at the time. For XviD the authors say anything less than a Pentium 300MHz is likely to encounter problems with skipping. You should be OK.

And to you.

through

Good luck, Jasen, I pass you the baton.

as others have said SCART does RGB otherwise you'll need to use S-video, or modify the insides of the TV.

I expect the ATI card can be configured to do interlacing, anything that's VGA compatible can.

Bye. Jasen