Nvidia to TV via S-video, how?

[Mortten]

I finally tried to plug my system together with a TV set. My gear is:

 

nvidia 7800 GT

32" 16:9 CRT TV with S-video input

DVBViewer 3.2.6.80

nvidia 81.98 drivers

nvidia purevideo decoder 1.02-196

 

My first lesson learned was that it is not trivial

 

When I had figured out every possible combination of dual display set-ups, I ended up with 'dualview' configuration. That was because I wanted to still have my LCD display attached and have to different resolutions on two displays.

 

Out of the box the quality of the picture on the tv was really poor. Some tweaking with color saturation and other settings made it look better but still it looked quite soft. Some sharpening improved that a little. I made a custom resolution of 720 x 576 which seemed to provide the best sharpness and clarity.

 

Next I noticed that picture of DVBViewer suddenly disappeared on TV. I changed from overlay to VMR9 and picture came back. However, picture seemed a little jerky, I guess that even my 3.2 GHz P4 and 7800GT can't quite cope with DirectX9 video output. I wasn't able to restore the overlay picture anymore. Can't tell what caused it's disappering either. By the way, while it still worked, I tried nvidia's video mirroring feature, which is quite nice. User can select which of two displays is used to display full screen video shown on the other display windowed or full screen. When I tried mirroring with overlay, OSD didn't show at all! With VMR OSD was visible on mirrored screen too.

 

My next observation was that the WSS (16:9) signal was not transmitted to my tv. I tried every combination of aspect ratio settings with both DVBViewer and nvidia decoder but the only way to display full screen 16:9 was to manually select it from the menu of the tv set.

 

I have two questions:

 

1) Is overlay generally a problem with this kind of combination (nvidia, S-video TV)?

 

2) Is there any possibility to send WSS signal to tv via S-video connection?

[Guest Lars_MQ]

1. overlay is shown only on the primary monitor. driver/windows thing.

 

2. As far as I know it's not possible.

[Mortten]

Thanks for very fast response, Lars!

 

I guess in standalone HTPC configuration with tv as the only display I could use overlay then. I can live with that

 

As for the WSS signal, do you think that WSS is not possible with DVBViewer application or is there generally a limitation with PC TV out hardware? I know my tv can detect the WSS signal from analog broadcast and switch viewing aspect ratio accordingly. Would be a really nice feature with DVBViewer too.