A few notes for people who may be using TV out or in from their computers and may be experiencing distortion and/or line noise. I am by no means an expert, just stating things I have learned and experienced.
There is a huge selection of cables to choose from from both audio and video. Its good to buy a decent quality cable with proper interconnects and shielding. S-video can be very sensitive to cable quality and interference but it will also usually give you a much better quality over RCA. A good cable, audio or video, should be of as short of a length as possble. The longer the cable is, the more suceptable you are to getting line interference and impedance. Good connectors are also very important. It doesn't matter how good your actual cable line is if you have junky connectors. Try to have well soldered gold or platinum plated plugs. Shielding of a cable is also very important. A non shielded or poorly shielded cable can pick up alot of interference, especially if it goes by objects that produce EM (electromagnetic) fields such as power lines/transformers or other electronics.
My personal preference is for a heavy guage oxygen free copper cable with good shielding and grounding. High purity copper is a good choice. Also buy cables to match your setup. You don't usually need a $300 cable for a $200 product. But using a $1000 product with a $20 cables will usually be a detriment to your quality. This applies to audio and video. I also don't advocate using brand name supre expensive wiring most of the times. Even something like Monster cable is a well known brand and they make decent low to mid level cables, but I find them very overpriced. I ordered from cabletogo.com and find their cables at 50% of the cost to be just as good, or sometimes better. Look at the specifications of a cable, not the brand (usually). Things to look for are the proper length you need, heavy guage, high copper purity preferably oxygen free, good shielding, good connectors, and of course a reasonable price.
I recently hooked up my Radeon 9800 to my Sony TV and experienced alot of distortion. This type of distortion and noise is very common. I knew it wasn't my S-video cable so I started looking a other possible problems. Sometimes this is caused by bad grounding and/or bad power. A power conditioner/UPS can help this. It may also benefit from you using the same power outlet/circuit for the TV as the computer. My problem was that my analog cable TV coax had alot of noise. When I disconnected the coax cable TV connection from my TV, the noise and distortion on my S-Video went away. I ordered a new HT reciever as well so I hope proper grounding of that will eliminate my noise problem while leaving both connections plugged in. I am also getting digital cable which I think will help a little.
I will also be feeding the 5.1 surround information to my reciever from my audigy2 via an optical connection. Proper grounds are very important here.
Also one other issue. WMP 9 (Windows Media Player) seems to have a security encryption (Macrovision I think) that prevents me from viewing video from WMP to a TV-out source. I really don't know why they do this. Its pretty annoying and over paranoid IMO. The video I am watching is freely public or my own personal DVD. Regardless any video from WMP is blocked. I have to circumvent this and open up a DVD app or video production software. Its annoying though because WMP is a bit easier for me to use in this case and my remote control. I specifically was trying to watch some trailers and also some animatrix clips. If anyone knows a good way around this or another app that can view WM files, I'd appreciate it.
Anyways if anyone wants to share experiences and knowledge about techical issues with video and audio in/out to external sources from their computer, please share.
There is a huge selection of cables to choose from from both audio and video. Its good to buy a decent quality cable with proper interconnects and shielding. S-video can be very sensitive to cable quality and interference but it will also usually give you a much better quality over RCA. A good cable, audio or video, should be of as short of a length as possble. The longer the cable is, the more suceptable you are to getting line interference and impedance. Good connectors are also very important. It doesn't matter how good your actual cable line is if you have junky connectors. Try to have well soldered gold or platinum plated plugs. Shielding of a cable is also very important. A non shielded or poorly shielded cable can pick up alot of interference, especially if it goes by objects that produce EM (electromagnetic) fields such as power lines/transformers or other electronics.
My personal preference is for a heavy guage oxygen free copper cable with good shielding and grounding. High purity copper is a good choice. Also buy cables to match your setup. You don't usually need a $300 cable for a $200 product. But using a $1000 product with a $20 cables will usually be a detriment to your quality. This applies to audio and video. I also don't advocate using brand name supre expensive wiring most of the times. Even something like Monster cable is a well known brand and they make decent low to mid level cables, but I find them very overpriced. I ordered from cabletogo.com and find their cables at 50% of the cost to be just as good, or sometimes better. Look at the specifications of a cable, not the brand (usually). Things to look for are the proper length you need, heavy guage, high copper purity preferably oxygen free, good shielding, good connectors, and of course a reasonable price.
I recently hooked up my Radeon 9800 to my Sony TV and experienced alot of distortion. This type of distortion and noise is very common. I knew it wasn't my S-video cable so I started looking a other possible problems. Sometimes this is caused by bad grounding and/or bad power. A power conditioner/UPS can help this. It may also benefit from you using the same power outlet/circuit for the TV as the computer. My problem was that my analog cable TV coax had alot of noise. When I disconnected the coax cable TV connection from my TV, the noise and distortion on my S-Video went away. I ordered a new HT reciever as well so I hope proper grounding of that will eliminate my noise problem while leaving both connections plugged in. I am also getting digital cable which I think will help a little.
I will also be feeding the 5.1 surround information to my reciever from my audigy2 via an optical connection. Proper grounds are very important here.
Also one other issue. WMP 9 (Windows Media Player) seems to have a security encryption (Macrovision I think) that prevents me from viewing video from WMP to a TV-out source. I really don't know why they do this. Its pretty annoying and over paranoid IMO. The video I am watching is freely public or my own personal DVD. Regardless any video from WMP is blocked. I have to circumvent this and open up a DVD app or video production software. Its annoying though because WMP is a bit easier for me to use in this case and my remote control. I specifically was trying to watch some trailers and also some animatrix clips. If anyone knows a good way around this or another app that can view WM files, I'd appreciate it.
Anyways if anyone wants to share experiences and knowledge about techical issues with video and audio in/out to external sources from their computer, please share.
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