To my amazement the pikey Chinese VGA to TV convertor not only arrived from HK, but works. My TV has no S-video input, so composite video feed only is possible, but the result is good enough for old TV torrent stuff. It did throw me for a while because: a) On first connection the picture was jiggling about like crazy. No amount of tweaking the supposed NTSC/PAL switches seemed to make it better. In the end I have found that just pulling out the USB power cord and reinserting it somehow sorts it out. b) On first connection I still had the lappy in extended desktop mode for the external monitor. Drag media player or the DVD player on to the extended desktop and the picture disappeared. Strangely Quicktime almost worked with MPEG. Putting it back in to standard mode and switching to view just the external connection worked fine (well as fine as composite video can be). Ta for the link. -- +----------------------------------------------------------------+ | Pete Fisher at Home: | | Voxan Roadster Gilera Nordwest * 2 Yamaha WR250Z | | Gilera GFR * 2 Moto Morini 2C/375 Morini 350 "Forgotten Error" | +----------------------------------------------------------------+
I've found many video cards can't put certain stuff on the extended desktop. -- Ivan Reid, School of Engineering & Design, _____________ CMS Collaboration, Brunel University. Ivan.Reid@[brunel.ac.uk|cern.ch] Room 40-1-B12, CERN GSX600F, RG250WD "You Porsche. Me pass!" DoD #484 JKLO#003, 005 WP7# 3000 LC Unit #2368 (tinlc) UKMC#00009 BOTAFOT#16 UKRMMA#7 (Hon) KotPT -- "for stupidity above and beyond the call of duty".
IIRC it's something to do with video overlay. I used to get the same problem with an LCD projector connected to a laptop, where PowerPoint presentations would be fine but embedded videos would just show as blank/black. The usual trick was to turn down the "video acceleration" a couple of notches and all would be fine.
