Playing on TV screen

[Sivodsi]

An idle question: has anyone ever used s-video out successfully to play CM via their television screen? All I can see is my desktop picture.

[Schrullenhaft]

I haven't tried myself to display CM on a TV screen, but I believe that there are a few details that would complicate such attempts.

CMBO is the only title that will run at 640x480 (properly), thus NTSC & PAL TV resolutions (overscan resolutions of 720x480 & 720x576 respectively) won't support the latter CM titles that need a minimum of 800x600. In fact the overscan resolutions typically will be cropped on a vast majority of standard resolution non-HDTV sets. Even the 640x480 resolution image will probably be cropped (though it may still be playable).

To see CM on your TV screen it would have to be set for the lowest resolution that particular version supports. Then the next issue is that the TV would have to be set as your primary display (which may not be possible with most setups). More than likely it is set as a secondary display right now, which would generally allow you to run the computer CRT at the same time. Deleting the CM Prefs and running through the options may show some resolutions on the TV display (it might identify it as the 'secondary display' in the resolutions boxes).

Unless you have some HDTV output capability to an HDTV capable set I believe that you will be disappointed with the way that CM appears on the TV screen with all of the jitter due to horizontal lines, etc. There's hardware out there that can help with this, but it's typically somewhat expensive (scan converters with certain features).

[ September 30, 2005, 06:21 PM: Message edited by: Schrullenhaft ]

[Sivodsi]

Thanks for the reply. Actually, managed to get it to work (found the settings that switch between external monitor and back). But the resolution is not as good as my computer screen - it was pretty hard to read the captions. I won't bother trying again, at least until cmx2 comes out...