Scan Converter vs. Video Card TV-out

[jdatec]

Still looking for information on a scan converter which might allow zooming in on a window or region, and not simply a 2x zoom. I have 3 scan converters ( 2 recently acquired ) and none allow more than a fixed 2x zoom with postion control - plus the zoom distorts A LOT , stretching the image vertically. Thanks!

Jim

[iluvJLO]

i got an ati rage fury pro. its got composite and s-video out. It looks sweet as hell in S-Video. I got a question. on my laptop (Sony Vaio), its got a neomagic tv out. It's weird, when i use it on the TV, i have to set the laptop's display at 640x480 so it will play movies in full screen properly. On my rage fury pro computer, i dont have to make any adjustments. it automatically shows the whole picture on the computer whereas the laptop will show some of the picture. Also, on the laptop, the left side of the screen, its cropped pretty deep. What's with that?

[jdatec]

Older scan converters only worked with 640x480 resolution. I have one of those and when I use it with my Toshiba laptop it's always necessary to have display settings at 640x480 or else the imgae goes crazy on the TV.
Running a newer 800x640 scan converter on the same laptop comes out fine on the TV.
I am not familiar with the neomagic - so you might check its specs to see if it can handle your Vaio's display settings.

[VideoGuy]

I ran a SVGA scan converter for a long time, and I forget who made it! Drats! Anyway, did a pretty dang good job, I was impressed! $149 brought it home.

If I ever remember the name and model, Ill repost.

[PORNOST4R]

I had a converter made by 'Trust' (??). I got for free to try it out, but the picture was terrible. Today I am still watching movies on my 21" monitor.

But I heard that Aitech makes great converters.

P.

[TIbrO]

I have a Voodoo 3 3500 TV AGP and a Matrox Marvel G400-TV in two seperate computers. The output from the Matrox is ofcourse way better than the Voodoo 3, but the Voodoo 3 is decent and watchable. Not to mention Counter-Strike on TV looks sexy. However, text from either card on the TV looks like crap, so don't even try to surf the web on TV with a TV OUT card, unless you want to make your optometrist rich and retire early.

The Marvel G400-TV lets me zoom and move around as well. However, if you plan on using an OS that is not Windows 98SE, then don't buy a Voodoo 3 3500 TV AGP or a Matrox Marvel G400-TV because they don't have drivers for those cards, nor will they get any.

[next]

I was actually able to surf the web pretty well with a couple of scan converters I have. I actually had a black PC with black periferals intergrated into my Home Audio/Video entertainment center. It looked pretty cool. The trick for surfing was to play around with the text and icon settings in Windows and Explorer. I set both to really really big - huge actually and it looked pretty darn good. Better than WebTV in most cases. I simply lost interest though.

edit -

Now that I think back my very first "DVD Player" was this PC. It had an old Creative first generation DVD Rom in it with the hardware decoder card and the output to the TV looked great. It was a pain to always have to boot it and use a wireless keyboard to watch a movie though.

I'm thinking about dragging the gear out of mothballs and seeing how divx looks. Been thinking about it for a couple of months but I've been busy with this VCD/SVCD stuff.

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: next on 2001-08-29 15:04:46 ]</font>

[VideoGuy]

I forget the model number, but I remember the scan converter was made by AverKey! Get one from them!! They make some EXCELENT SCs, and the one I had was about $149!

Good luck..