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video cards

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by rtrg

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I found a special vga cable. 15 pin to svideox1,analog videox1,left/right audiox2. I intended to use the ON BOARD vga connector to run the video to a vcr in turn to my tv. I currently use a vga box for that purpose. I understand that the on board vga MAY or MAY NOT work with this cable. I also understand that SOME video cards have tv out capability at the vga port. I have ONE card for my pci slot. This card has vga ONLY. How do I distinguish a card with tv out at the vga port versus one that does not? The web site does NOT mention this. Cards are very expensive in my view and buying a card just to be able to use this cable makes no sense to me. I already have the box that works fine. This cable was a "FOUND" item. Any way I can determine whether the on board or card vga will work? Why don*t all vga ports provide tv out? Thank you.

5 replies

by seanferd

You could have posted the part number for the graphics card/chipset, then someone could look for you.

Why do they not all have TV-out? Because TV does not work the same as computer monitors. So, you need graphics with the TV-out hardware, or a TV which accepts video from computer graphics cards.

How to distinguish cards? The ones with TV-out prominently advertise the the fact that they are TV-out, as it is a big selling point.

by ic-it

That the VGA port itself does not carry any audio signals. You will need to capture this from the sound device.

by older mycroft

Computer monitors are set up to run with the RGB system of colour rendition. Your TV will be running with NTSC which is a much inferior method of display. The shape of pixels on a TV screen are a completely different grid array also, which usually ends up with a computer image that looks blurred and out of focus.

However, if you had a modern TV equipped with connectors capable of accepting direct communication from the PCs direct output, the pixel grid array would not cause blurry images.

Over the years, computer monitors have always cost more than TVs of an equal screen size for this very reason. It is only recently that the relative costs of each have converged, mainly due to TVs being capable of producing computer imagery, without any intermediate adjustments being necessary.

by slayer_

If your trying to hook it up straight to your TV and no computer monitor, it should just work when you boot up your system, no matter which OS your using.

If you meant you want to hook up a TV but it doesn't have a VGA port, an S video, or even the old yellow thingy (WTF's it called again?) will work just fine, many old cards had that.

If your scenerio is you have an onboard and a video card, you need to make sure they are both turned on. Usually the onboard auto turns off when you plug in a card, it can sometimes be a challenge to get it turned back on. Play around in your BIOS.

When you do get it turned on, open up display properties (assuming Windows OS) and tell it to extend your desktop to the other monitor.

If you can tell us specifically which video card you have and what operating system, we can help you further.

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