Connecting Acer Laptop to JVC TV via vga?

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Stephen
Connecting Acer Laptop to JVC TV via vga?

Hi guys,

My first post.

I have a Acer laptop with a VGA port. It does not have a Video or S-Video out. I want to connect the laptop to my JVC analog tv. is it possible to veiw movies from the laptop on the tv?

My laptop has the following: VGA out
My TV has the following:
Terminals: Front: AV input x 1, Headphones x 1; Rear: S-input x 1, AV input x 2 (1 with DVD), DVD component input x 1, AV output x 1

i already have a satellite receiver n dvd player attached to the tv.

So is it possible to connect my laptop to the tv. If yes what equipment do i need and how do i go about it..
Thks

Matt Whitlock
Stephen, Welcome to the

Stephen,

Welcome to the TechLore Community! I hope you find your experience good enough to recommend TechLore to your friends and family!

Hooking up a computer to a TV can be a daunting task, especially if you're trying to do it in high resolution. Fortunately for you, hooking a PC to an S-Video jack can be pretty simple. In fact, there are some relatively inexpensive devices that you can plug into your laptop's VGA port that will do everything for you, and provide an S-video or composite video output.

One such box is the Kworld PC to TV adapter.




This will do everything you need to connect your laptop's VGA out to an S-video input on your TV. Though it accepts many different computer resolutions, you'll want to set your laptop to output a signal no greater than 800x600.

You can purchase the Kworld PC to TV adapter dirt cheap at Amazon.

Stephen
This forum rocks..Will look

This forum rocks..Will look up on this adapter at amazon..Thks a ton Matt ;-)

Cheers

Stephen
Hi Matt,Just wanted to

Hi Matt,

Just wanted to clarify something else before buying tht adapter. U said i shud preferably not set the resolution on my laptop more then 800x600. But at this resolution, will the quality be good enough to watch on the TV. currently the quality of the divx,avi,etc files are fantastic. How much will the quality suffer. Will it go down by 10-15%? if it goes down by 30-40% then it wont be worth seeing ont he tv..wud it?

Cheers

Matt Whitlock
Stephen, this is where it

Stephen, this is where it gets fun! I hope you can follow me through this.

When using an analog connection, like S-Video or composite, your display is limited to resolution of 480i. Translated, this is a resolution of 720x480 in an interlaced format.

Now, your laptop will be outputting signals with a resolution higher than 480i to this box, which will need to be scaled to fit the TV screen. The scaling process from progressive high-resolution PC images to analog video is difficult. At resolutions like 1024x768, the video details are so fine, things like text won't scale very well. The more scaling that is required, the worse the image will look.

Here's an example of what scaling can do to an image. This is a high-res snapshot of this forum thread that got scaled when it was uploaded to TechLore.



The image started at 983x739, and was scaled to fit a width of 360 pixels. These little boxes will do a better job of scaling than this example shows, but the general rule is the more scaling, the worse.

In fact, the best signal you could output to this little box would be 720x480, which would translate very well to a TV screen (it's the native resolution of the monitor), but setting your computer to this res will make screen items like desktop icons and such very large, which makes it less useful for web surfing and other tasks. 800x600 looks less pretty when scaled, but most details and text are still viewable, and you don't have to scroll left and right to do everything. However, if all you're going to do is launce a media player to watch movies, setting it to a low res shouldn't be mich of a burden.

If you're going to be watching DVD videos, you'll get better performance using your set top DVD player than your laptop. Of course, there are many other useful reasons why having a PC connected to your TV is worthwhile. Oh, and you'll need to remember to make the VGA output your primary monitor when connected to your TV.

 

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