TV-out screen tearing

[Shoeberto]

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I discovered the other day that my PC has both S-video and component/composite (whatever it's called, it's the one with yellow for video and red and white for sound) out. So I brought a TV in and hooked them up, then booted my computer. It worked fine for the booting process - all of the DOS screens and Windows splashes appeared normally on the TV and monitor. But when I acutally got into windows, I got some terrible screen tearing. I looked in Advanced Display Properties where there were some ATI tools for setting up TV display, but no matter what I would try, I couldn't get it to display normally. When I turned off the TV-out option, everything on the monitor looks just like always but with nothing on the TV.

Suggestions?

[Flying Mullet]

I haven't had much luck with my tv display either. Once I'm in windows I change my display settings so that the tv is a monitor as well, and that part works. The unfortunate part is that the text is really hard to read and I have to decrease the resolution to 800x600 to be able to read anything. I have an HDTV so I though that the tv could handle the higher resolution, but I guess not. But when I play games like diablo, if it has a big enough/fat enough font then I can read the text just fine. It's just when the font is small and skinny(like on this message board and most windows applications) that I can't read it. Unless someone has had very good success with using a tv as a monitor, I'm going to guess that tv technology hasn't caught up enough to handle the output of a computer, unless they have a super-fancy plasma tv.
Maybe people in Europe or other parts of the world(I don't know where you live Hsu) have tried this and can give their results? I know that the resolution on televisions is better in Europe than in U.S.

[Shoeberto]

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I'm in US. I've tried messing around with the standards, like switching between NTSC M and N or whatever other ones they had, but it didn't change anything.

If it helps any, my graphics card is an ATI Rage Pro 2x 8mb.


EDIT: How do you set up the TV so it's like a monitor? The only thing I've been able to find is changing the drivers for the monitor to Generic TV, and even then it's still the same.

[Bulldog]

A lot of older graphics cards don't support Dualview. That might be the problem.

When using my TV as a monitor, I can see and read the fonts when browsing through the internet, but it ain't as pretty as my <s>face</s> computer monitor.

Yeah, I'm currently living in Europe.

[crono_logical]

You're not going to get better than 800x600 on a TV screen, due to limitations of NTSC/PAL, PAL having the higher resolution (because it is lower FPS than NTSC). And the reason why everything is hard to read is because TVs don't use square pixels arrranged in a grid like a monitor, you'll see they tend to be rectangular and arranged in a honeycomb type fashion instead, so you're not gonna get as sharp an image. Certainly better for 3D games though, since you don't need to get the computer to anti-alias, the TV screen does it for you, so you can have higher framerates

But yeah, I tend to find Flying Mullet's method the best, add the TV after booting the computer up. You can also set it as a second monitor and extend the desktop onto it instead so you don't have to have the same image or resolution as the computer screen. and drag whatever windows you want onto the TV screen instead.

[Shoeberto]

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How would I go about setting up my TV as a monitor? The only way it'll display an image is if I change the display options with the ATI tools in the Display Properties>Settings>Advanced Settings area, and none of the options in there really do anything to change the image.

[Flying Mullet]

I tried playing with the settings on my tv to help make the picture better, but they didn't have much of an effect. And the only other way to really work with the settings is in the advanced settings of the display settings, as you have been doing. As crono_logical said, anything larger than 800x600 will be hard to view, and I don't even find that setting that worthwhile. It's neat at first but the novelty wears off after a while and I don't even bother with making my tv an extra monitor anymore.