Laptop Scan Converter

[endlessnameless]

I have a two year old laptop that has a built in S-video port. I never had the urge to mess with it until recently. When I hooked it up to our Regular Tube TV it gave a good picture, but due to the lower resolution of the TV it looked rather pixelated. Would getting a scan converter help to remedy this? I'm generally going to use the laptop to play games and possibly watch some divx movies, etc. Any advice on this would be greatly appreciated.

THe TV is a 27" flat tube tv

the laptop is a 1.8 ghz athalon processor with 1.5 gig ram and winxp

[filmboss80]

Output to TV is affected by a number of things like video file type (including bitrate, compression scheme, and aspect ratio) and graphics card setting and capability. If it already has an S-Video plug out, it may be already be equipped for monitoring on a standard tv--and in that case, no scan converter would be necessary.

Sometimes, videos that look good on a computer monitor will look like crap on a tv. More info about the types of videos you are playing would be helpful, especially about the divx encodings.

[endlessnameless]

Thanks for the quick response. You've basically answered my question and saved me some $$$$$. Divx movies and such seem to do alright, I haven't tested many though. And I only tried TFC which seemed to display alright. I just noticed that the desktop was very pixelated and hard to read as well as text which I guess is supposed to be expected.

[jagabo]

An external scan converter won't do any better than your laptop's s-video output port. Standard definition TV has a gray scale resolution of about 640x480. The color resolution is about 320x480 at best. If you can run your laptop at 640x480 you'll get a slightly better picture. At higher resolutions the desktop is first digitally scaled to 640x480 then output to the s-video port.

This post https://forum.videohelp.com/topic345015.html#1849172 has a rough example of what happens to a 1024x768 desktop when output to an s-video port.