1080i Output to HDTV using Laptop S Video?

[rmoyes02]

Is it possible to use my laptop's S video cable to produce 1080i output to my hd tv? Right now, I hooked up to S-Video to the TV, and set the "Generic TV" on my laptop to display 1024x768 resolution. I played an HD trailer, and the display looked awesome. Not quite as good as 1080i though. So then I switched the resolution to 1900x1080, and the picture scroll's with the mouse, it's not the full resolution.

So I'm wondering if it's possible for me to install drivers for the "Generic TV" to be a "HD TV" instead. Anyone had any experience with this?

Thanks

 

[Nelviticus]

It's not really something you can do with drivers, the results depend on what your hardware is capable of. There's a chip on board that converts your PC's chosen resolution into an interlaced TV-compatible mode, which is normally about 500 lines for NTSC or 600 lines for PAL. There might be a driver setting that determines whether it 'squishes' the PC's resolution to fit into this number of lines (so it all fits one one screen) or leaves it as it is (so you have to scroll around) or it may just make up its own mind based on what resolution you've chosen.

I'm quite surprised that it looked good on your TV though as whenever I've tried to display a high-res PC output over S-Video it's looked awful! Having said that, movie clips tend to look a lot better than Windows applications plus I suspect that your HDTV 'upscaled' the PC's output to make it look better.

Regards

Nelviticus

 

[felixc]

S-video is only the NTSC standard, so you won't get anything more than 400 lines of hor resolution, and 480i for the vetical resolution. However, high-quality contents can look quite good on an S-video connector. But if all you have is S-video as the output from our laptop, you won't be able to improve from that connector.

Does your HDtv have a VGA input? If you want higher resolution, this is where the full analog signal should come through.