S-Video Woes

[Pentium4]

So I'm at my parents' place for a while, and all I want to do is enjoy some Netflix with my brother on my TV via an old 27" tube. I have plenty of video cards with S-Video, and I have a cable. The cable is 7 pin S-Video with 3.5mm audio jack, to the standard video (yellow) and audio (red, white) which plugs into the front of the TV.

Here's the issue I'm having....it will only give video on AGP cards. It's been so frustrating. I've tried on 8600GT, 7600GS, 7300GT, 6600GT Pci-e cards, nothing. The millisecond I boot up with an X1050 or X1300 AGP card, instant video. It's frustrating because I don't have any CPU with AGP that is powerful enough to run Netflix. I also threw out most of my DDR RAM, all I have is 1.5GB. Not even an OC'd Athlon XP @ 2.06GHz can run it without lag, and I don't want to do a new install via IDE on a P4 2.8GHz because I don't think that would be any more powerful.

Is this an issue with the cable? I don't know why AGP/Pci-e would have anything to do with it. Maybe I'm missing something. Any ideas would be appreciated

[ratdude747]

Re: S-Video Woes

I've personally never had good luck with s-video on graphics cards... not really an answer but at least confirmation that you're not going crazy.

[stj]

Re: S-Video Woes

it can be turned on and off by the driver - check your options.
it can also be disabled if you view "copywrited" material and you use windows.
possibly also in Linux if your using the nvidia driver, but i'm not sure linux passes the flags from the media file to the driver.

[tom66]

Re: S-Video Woes

And people wonder why I pirate. I have a Netflix sub, but download virtually everything I want to watch.
VLC ignores copy protect flag. So does Raspberry Pi with OSMC/Kodi.

[Pentium4]

Re: S-Video Woes

Check which options?

I've tried Linux and windows. Works with dvi but not s-video. Even when there's no hard drive plugged in, just trying to get video I get nothing.

[Pentium4]

Re: S-Video Woes

And yeah no wonder people pirate! With vlc even ancient hardware with a third the specs can run HD better than standard in netflix

[stj]

Re: S-Video Woes

the disable flag was imposed a long time ago to shut up the hollyweird crowd who thought people would hook the pc to a vcr!

it shouldnt be effected by the desktop, what make videocard are you using?
i know nvidia has a bunch of dropdown options linked to an icon in the taskbar, or it did when i used windows once upon a time.
but it may need to be enabled.

btw, also this:
http://nvidia.custhelp.com/app/answe...s-video/page/1

[Pentium4]

Re: S-Video Woes

It's got to be an issue with the video card or something. I could not for the life of me get it to work. I ended up plugging the damn thing into an RF modulator, with S-video and L/R audio going to the converter and then going out via coax RG6 to the TV. It works perfectly now with a surpisingly good picture, that just wasn't ideally what I had in mind when I was setting this thing up For the sake of knowledge, anyone know why this issue occurred in the first place?

[stj]

Re: S-Video Woes

sounds o.k. if your feeding video to the modulator.
maybe your confusing s-video with cvbs
s-video has 2 signals because it seperates the colour and brightness data.

[Pentium4]

Re: S-Video Woes

The cable is 7p S-Video to CVBS. I figured if I had a wrong cable then it wouldn't work on any PC, but it worked fine on AGP cards. The cable I have going to the modulator is a standard 4p S-Video cable.

[stj]

Re: S-Video Woes

the 7pin rings a bell, it was used for an nvidia gforce2 card that had built-in capture aswell as tv-out.
i had one once.

probably your using the wrong cable.