VGA vs. Composite/Svideo

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#26
It's not possible to turn crap into DVD quality, but you can make it look signifigantly better. I always watch TV/VHS on my PC instead of on a real TV, it looks a lot better. VHS still looks pretty crappy, but my cable signal looks pretty nice. No, not as good as HDTV, but I also only paid $40 for the card, and I don't have to pay extra for HDTV service(no way in hell I'm gonna pick up any air signals here, I can't even get any regular signals).
 
#30
Oh so im the damn guinnea pig huh? No one actually tried this? Jk, its okay if it looks like crap i will resell it. Oh and of course im gonna post results, but my cam suck, I will still try my best to get somewhat acurate result pics.
 
#31
I went to the links posted but I was wondering how do you know that it quadruples the video lines up to XGA? It just says The Normal External TV BOX can provide high quality picture, It can give sharp, stable image output to VGA.
and if it does... would that be with (using composite video from vcr to this device) running a vga cable from this device to the ohp panel or could you still quadruple the video with another composite video cable using the composite out.

My dukane 4003 ohp arrived today and im waiting on my sharp QA1150 projection panel. I wanna run the composite video from my vcr to the panel. Will the picture be that bad? Is it worth the $70 plus shipping to get this device? i have less than $200 in this project so far..
 
#32
I will let ya know when it gets here. The quality of composite isnt really THAT bad, but after watching vga dvds (through a laptop), there is no compairison. Oh and i think i was watching the vga dvds at 800x600, and to me it was still jaw dropping. After a few days of watching plain composite im happy with it, but there is still that vga quality in the back of my head that i keep trying to compare it to.
 
#33
I was pretty happy just using my PS2 through the composite input on my QA-1650, until I hooked it up to my computer and actually paid attention to the picture quality.

Now my problem is that I need to figure out how to get my computer to play dvd's better... It's just damn near fast enough. It's my old computer, and I had a 6GB HDD to drop in it, so I formatted it, installed win2k, dropped all the available ram I had in it, leaving me with an AMD K6 400Mhz 224Mb RAM machine with WinDVD as the only installed piece of software. I can play a dvd on it, and it will do the playback, but it's just a touch choppy. If I slow down the dvd playback speed by just one notch, it plays great, but at regular speed it just jumps a little... It's enough to notice. So now I gotta figure out how to get a little more juice out of my machine... I've maxed out the CPU on the motherboard, but I need to see if a flash will help me out there... Ram will only hold a max of 384, so I have some room there, but I kinda doubt that will help. May try installing Win98 instead.

Any other ideas for low overhead DVD playback that will run smoothly on a machine such as described above?
 
#35
kcsabresfan said:
It's my old computer, and I had a 6GB HDD to drop in it, so I formatted it, installed win2k, dropped all the available ram I had in it, leaving me with an AMD K6 400Mhz 224Mb RAM machine with WinDVD as the only installed piece of software. I can play a dvd on it, and it will do the playback, but it's just a touch choppy.

<snip!>

Any other ideas for low overhead DVD playback that will run smoothly on a machine such as described above?
Click to expand...

I believe the only way to get decent (smooth with good frame quality) playback on such a machine is to use a dedicated card for playback. I believe there is (or at least was) one called the X-Card or similar. Real Hollywood seems to ring a bell too.

I also tried something similar to what you've done. I had a K6-500. I found the video card had the biggest impact. A typical low end AGP card was hopeless, a Matrox 400-max (new and expensive at the time) helped a lot. Fiddling M/B jumpers for cache and clock speed had less effect. Memory didn't seem to be an issue - I think I only had 64MB but then I was running win98 with only PowerDVD installed. H/D selection should have no impact on performance (unless I'm missing something to do with ATA interrupts or something). The DVD player should ideally be on its own IDE channel anyway. Incidentally I tried WinDVD and PowerDVD (newish XP version). Both were jumpy. I tried an older version of PowerDVD and it was much smoother, though the frame quality was not as good as for the later version. I'm probably being a bit picky as I was using output to a projector (Davis DLP-450 for what it's worth a low end but stilll ok 800x600res unit). These effects tend to show up more on a 2m wide image.

If I was to do it all again, I'd either buy the X-card which from memory seemed to be quite cheap at the time and supposedly offered great quality VGA output, or upgrade the M/B and CPU and video card to something a good deal faster (though these days cheap). The previous posters recommendation for video card sounds wise to me in this case.

Cheers!
 
#36
Yeah my laptop is 1.1ghz with only 128mb of ram and an amd athlon 4 processor, so id say its not the memory that is the problem. Oh and my laptop is bogged down with crap and hasnt been defraged in a long time, but the playback is perfect. Id say more processor speed is what you need.
 
#39
hey poohbear.. when are you expecting your normal external tv box thingy..lol whatever ya call it. Im just too anxious to see if it makes a difference, my playstation isnt very playable with the darker images im getting. (my playstation which i also use as my dvd player is significantly way dimmer than just watching regular tv, both through my vcr)
 
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