How to connect VGA output to a TV input?

Ron Lowe wrote:

The RGB voltage levels are very slightly different, but not enough to
concern us. We can wire the RGB srtaight through.

The difference is inthe sync.
The H+V sync are seperate on VGA, and need to be combined into a
composite sync. The circuit 2/3 way downthis pace will do the job.

http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/RGB_Scart

I'd imagine any useable VGA-SCART cable will perform this task, like the
one I indicated.

Yes if you combine the sync pules, it *can* work, but only if you can
set the card to output a "TV compatible modeline" e.g. 720x576
interlaced 50Hz, in general Windows can do it, Linux can on *some*
cards, Something called PowerTop(?) might help for windows.

Be careful, you could damage the TV.

"Malcolm H" wrote in message
...

"David" wrote in message
...


"Malcolm H" wrote in message
...
What is the simplest way to connect the VGA output from Dell PC to a
Panasonic Viera TV with SCART and HDMI inputs.

I'll echo what somebody else has said. There is often a PC input and a long
VGA cable will probably do the job.

I have just bought a Panasonic Viera "81" series (with the built in
Freesat). I have just gone through the pain of wringing out the best
performance of this TV as a secondary computer monitor for a Dell PC.


Has the computer got a digital DVi socket?
If yes connect to the TVs HDMi, with a lead with a DVi and HDMi or an
HDMi lead + adaptor for DVi this will give picture only. Use phono's on
computer to get sound to audio inputs on TV.


This is one approach. My Dell has an ATI X300 card with dual output (one
VGA, one DVI). Being old-ish, the DVI wouldn't support the high resolutions
of the plasma and didn't carry audio.

Then I started to look at swapping out the graphics card for a better one -
I thought I should upgrade the PC graphics at the same time. I didn't do a
massive amount of research - it is very difficult to make a fair comparison
from one graphics card to another with the sketchy details the sellers and
manufacturers give. I found the following significant things:

* ATI type cards more often have an on-board digital sound chip so the HDMI
outputs sound too. The nVidia cards seemed to use a jumper cable to a
digital section of an existing sound card. I worried that I had "motherboad
sound" and might not have had a place to plug the jumper cable in, so I shot
for ATI based technology.

* The next factor was that I figured out that I needed a PCI Express card.
That seems to be the most common type. Old PCs may be problematic here.

* Next up, how to use an HDMI cable from the graphics card? Sounds simple?
That was the biggest stumbling block. A high percentage of the graphics
cards seemed to provide DVI connectors and then a "dongle" to extract the
analogue VGA signal that seems to be present for an existing monitor. Most
seemed to have two DVIs, so you could buy an extra dongle and go dual
headed. A few web-sites pointed out that the DVI to HDMI "dongles" you can
buy on eBay and the like do not pass through the ATI audio - it is on non
standard pins and not part of the normal DVI specification so not wired
through the adapters. There was an American website where you could get the
ATI "dongles", but they were as expensive as the whole new graphics card.

* Some graphics cards had descriptions that said there were none, one or two
dongles in the box. There was a suspicious phrase "HDMI compatible" which
suggested that there was a DVI that supported digital audio, but that the
necessary adapter would not be in the box.

After all that I found a few graphics cards with a proper HDMI socket on the
back as well as either VGA or DVI. In the end I bought an ASUS EAH3450/DI
Radeon HD 3450 from a company called Specialtech I found on Amazon. It cost
£34.16 including the postage and packing and arrived in 3 days. The clincher
was that there was a digital photograph on the advert clearly showing an
HDMI and a VGA port on the card - exactly the right connectors.
www.specialtech.co.uk if the address helps anyone

I also bought a 10m HDMI-HDMI cable, the longest length without using "dual
link" (which looks like differential transmission to me) that people claimed
would work. It's about 7m from my PC to the TV. To round it out, I bought a
standard RF keyboard and mouse set and a 10m USB extension cable - the
keybord says it has a range of 20cm, but in reality it works for about 1.5m
around the USB receiver.

So now to plug it all together:

* Uninstall all video drivers
* Power down the PC
* Pull the X300 and card and slot the 3450
* Power up
* use the ASUS supplied driver and utility CD

All went smoothly at this point. The PC 4:3 screen monitor came back up in
1024x768. A re-boot to complete the install and I could again access the
1280x1024 native PC monitor resolution. Time now to bring the Panny into the
equation:

* I plugged the HDMI cable into HDMI 1 on the plasma. Only HDMI 1 and 3 on
the TV support digital audio on HDMI, if you use HDMI2, you need to send the
audio in on the audio RCAs. I didn't have that option because our Wii is on
component and uses those audio connectors.

* Plugging the HDMI cable into the PC was traumatic. PC expansion cards held
by clips or a single screw bend alarmingly when the connector is a decent
friction fit. I won't be unplugging the PC end of the HDMI cable in a hurry.

* The plasma has a native resolution of 1920x1080 and should be able to run
1080p. One of the reasons for going HDMI was that on the PC input a maximum
resolution of 1280x1024 seemed to be available which the plasma then badly
interpolated to give the full panel picture.

* ASUS shipped the reference ATI driver and Catalyst Control Centre. Not the
most intuitive software.

* I power up the Panasonic and by the miracle that is HDMI, the Catalyst
control centre spotted a 1080p display on the other end of the cable.

* I set the resolution of that display to 1080p, 1920x1080 and got a fuzzy
zebra crawling mess that didn't fill the whole screen. What was going on?

* Eventually I twigged that the Panasonic was not expecting a 1920x1080 60Hz
signal, but a 1920x1080 50Hz signal. Changing that setting gave a full
screen native resolution full 1080p picture.

* Reboot and all was well

* Right. Now the "latest and greatest" drivers from ATI to fix any bugs that
might be out there (hah!). Downloaded from the link from ASUS to ATI.
Installed successfully Oh...

* After the reboot, the plasma came up as the primary monitor with the
desktop monitor as a clone. 1920x1080x50Hz on a 4:3 19" Dell el-cheapo
monitor is not too good a formula. And here is where the fun really begins.
Change to desktop stretch rather than clone so that I can support the
different resolutions and a "you have 15 seconds to confirm the change" box
appears. Now 15 seconds is not a lot of time with both monitors re-syncing,
auto adjusting and the monitors being 7m apart and having to play hunt the
cursor and indeed hunt the keyboard (there are now two plugged in).

* Get the resolutions changed and try to swap the desktop PC monitor to be
primary and then the Catalyst Control Centre crashes. Better than that, the
crash seems to delete an important file and now the control centre won't
even start up.

* Reboot again. Same rigmarole - Plasma becomes primary, PC monitor can't
cope with being a clone of a 1080p set!

* Re-install the ATI driver and control centre to restore the missing file.
Hurumph. Now it seems that according to ATI that I'm not the administrator
of my own computer and can't install the software. Uninstall the whole
shooting match in disgust.

* Back to the ASUS supplied drivers. As old as the hills (in computing
terms - earlier in 2008) but they do seem to work reliably. Back to the old
settings.

* And then all is more or less well in the world. A bit more tweaking gets
to:

My desktop continues from the 4:3 monitor on my desk to the plasma in the
seating area of my study. I can drag a window off my desktop onto the 42"
"monitor" at full 1920x1080 resolution, and it is very readable - definitely
high quality. If I run either Real Audio Player of Windows Media Player and
video content is spotted on the main desktop monitor then I have an option
set to display it full screen on the plasma, over-riding the desktop
extension automatically.

There are a few "features" I don't like. Whenever the plasma is turned on or
off, the desktop display glitches for a half a second whilst my desktop
re-configures and stretches or contracts, even if the HDMI on the Panasonic
is not the current display, but I can live with that.

Of course the full HDMI graphics card now properly supports HDCP. I used to
be able to copy my wife's recorded television from her Media Centre 2005 PC
across to mine to watch programmes she had recorded. Now the DRM kicks in on
all my monitors and I can't watch the BBC's protected content - they have
set the protected flag in the DVR-MS file format. There is a work-around - I
convert to MPEG2 using a program called DVRMStoMPEG. This conversion is
quite quick because it would appear that DVR-MS is MPEG2 in thin disguise -
the disguise being metadata for DRM and the like. So recorded Freeview is
now automatically archived to DivX every night, stored on a NAS box and
ready to watch on the plasma the following day. A program called MCEBuddy
works well here.

All in all a success, but several days of playing around to get it all to
work reliably together. Fell free to hurl more questions my way if you want
to go this route, or if you want to find out what life with a Panasonic
Freesat plasma is like. That wasn't without its pain either - but more along
the lines of skinned knuckles swapping the LNB on my dish for a quad...

Hope this helps,

David Slee

"Dave Slee" wrote in message
...
"Malcolm H" wrote in message
...

"David" wrote in message
...


"Malcolm H" wrote in message
...
What is the simplest way to connect the VGA output from Dell PC to a
Panasonic Viera TV with SCART and HDMI inputs.

I'll echo what somebody else has said. There is often a PC input and a
long VGA cable will probably do the job.

I have just bought a Panasonic Viera "81" series (with the built in
Freesat). I have just gone through the pain of wringing out the best
performance of this TV as a secondary computer monitor for a Dell PC.


Has the computer got a digital DVi socket?
If yes connect to the TVs HDMi, with a lead with a DVi and HDMi or an
HDMi lead + adaptor for DVi this will give picture only. Use phono's
on computer to get sound to audio inputs on TV.


This is one approach. My Dell has an ATI X300 card with dual output (one
VGA, one DVI). Being old-ish, the DVI wouldn't support the high
resolutions of the plasma and didn't carry audio.

Then I started to look at swapping out the graphics card for a better
one - I thought I should upgrade the PC graphics at the same time. I
didn't do a massive amount of research - it is very difficult to make a
fair comparison from one graphics card to another with the sketchy details
the sellers and manufacturers give. I found the following significant
things:

* ATI type cards more often have an on-board digital sound chip so the
HDMI outputs sound too. The nVidia cards seemed to use a jumper cable to a
digital section of an existing sound card. I worried that I had
"motherboad sound" and might not have had a place to plug the jumper cable
in, so I shot for ATI based technology.

* The next factor was that I figured out that I needed a PCI Express card.
That seems to be the most common type. Old PCs may be problematic here.

* Next up, how to use an HDMI cable from the graphics card? Sounds simple?
That was the biggest stumbling block. A high percentage of the graphics
cards seemed to provide DVI connectors and then a "dongle" to extract the
analogue VGA signal that seems to be present for an existing monitor. Most
seemed to have two DVIs, so you could buy an extra dongle and go dual
headed. A few web-sites pointed out that the DVI to HDMI "dongles" you can
buy on eBay and the like do not pass through the ATI audio - it is on non
standard pins and not part of the normal DVI specification so not wired
through the adapters. There was an American website where you could get
the ATI "dongles", but they were as expensive as the whole new graphics
card.

* Some graphics cards had descriptions that said there were none, one or
two dongles in the box. There was a suspicious phrase "HDMI compatible"
which suggested that there was a DVI that supported digital audio, but
that the necessary adapter would not be in the box.

After all that I found a few graphics cards with a proper HDMI socket on
the back as well as either VGA or DVI. In the end I bought an ASUS
EAH3450/DI Radeon HD 3450 from a company called Specialtech I found on
Amazon. It cost £34.16 including the postage and packing and arrived in 3
days. The clincher was that there was a digital photograph on the advert
clearly showing an HDMI and a VGA port on the card - exactly the right
connectors. www.specialtech.co.uk if the address helps anyone

I also bought a 10m HDMI-HDMI cable, the longest length without using
"dual link" (which looks like differential transmission to me) that people
claimed would work. It's about 7m from my PC to the TV. To round it out, I
bought a standard RF keyboard and mouse set and a 10m USB extension
cable - the keybord says it has a range of 20cm, but in reality it works
for about 1.5m around the USB receiver.

So now to plug it all together:

* Uninstall all video drivers
* Power down the PC
* Pull the X300 and card and slot the 3450
* Power up
* use the ASUS supplied driver and utility CD

All went smoothly at this point. The PC 4:3 screen monitor came back up in
1024x768. A re-boot to complete the install and I could again access the
1280x1024 native PC monitor resolution. Time now to bring the Panny into
the equation:

* I plugged the HDMI cable into HDMI 1 on the plasma. Only HDMI 1 and 3 on
the TV support digital audio on HDMI, if you use HDMI2, you need to send
the audio in on the audio RCAs. I didn't have that option because our Wii
is on component and uses those audio connectors.

* Plugging the HDMI cable into the PC was traumatic. PC expansion cards
held by clips or a single screw bend alarmingly when the connector is a
decent friction fit. I won't be unplugging the PC end of the HDMI cable in
a hurry.

* The plasma has a native resolution of 1920x1080 and should be able to
run 1080p. One of the reasons for going HDMI was that on the PC input a
maximum resolution of 1280x1024 seemed to be available which the plasma
then badly interpolated to give the full panel picture.

* ASUS shipped the reference ATI driver and Catalyst Control Centre. Not
the most intuitive software.

* I power up the Panasonic and by the miracle that is HDMI, the Catalyst
control centre spotted a 1080p display on the other end of the cable.

* I set the resolution of that display to 1080p, 1920x1080 and got a fuzzy
zebra crawling mess that didn't fill the whole screen. What was going on?

* Eventually I twigged that the Panasonic was not expecting a 1920x1080
60Hz signal, but a 1920x1080 50Hz signal. Changing that setting gave a
full screen native resolution full 1080p picture.

* Reboot and all was well

* Right. Now the "latest and greatest" drivers from ATI to fix any bugs
that might be out there (hah!). Downloaded from the link from ASUS to ATI.
Installed successfully Oh...

* After the reboot, the plasma came up as the primary monitor with the
desktop monitor as a clone. 1920x1080x50Hz on a 4:3 19" Dell el-cheapo
monitor is not too good a formula. And here is where the fun really
begins. Change to desktop stretch rather than clone so that I can support
the different resolutions and a "you have 15 seconds to confirm the
change" box appears. Now 15 seconds is not a lot of time with both
monitors re-syncing, auto adjusting and the monitors being 7m apart and
having to play hunt the cursor and indeed hunt the keyboard (there are now
two plugged in).

* Get the resolutions changed and try to swap the desktop PC monitor to be
primary and then the Catalyst Control Centre crashes. Better than that,
the crash seems to delete an important file and now the control centre
won't even start up.

* Reboot again. Same rigmarole - Plasma becomes primary, PC monitor can't
cope with being a clone of a 1080p set!

* Re-install the ATI driver and control centre to restore the missing
file. Hurumph. Now it seems that according to ATI that I'm not the
administrator of my own computer and can't install the software. Uninstall
the whole shooting match in disgust.

* Back to the ASUS supplied drivers. As old as the hills (in computing
terms - earlier in 2008) but they do seem to work reliably. Back to the
old settings.

* And then all is more or less well in the world. A bit more tweaking gets
to:

My desktop continues from the 4:3 monitor on my desk to the plasma in the
seating area of my study. I can drag a window off my desktop onto the 42"
"monitor" at full 1920x1080 resolution, and it is very readable -
definitely high quality. If I run either Real Audio Player of Windows
Media Player and video content is spotted on the main desktop monitor then
I have an option set to display it full screen on the plasma, over-riding
the desktop extension automatically.

There are a few "features" I don't like. Whenever the plasma is turned on
or off, the desktop display glitches for a half a second whilst my desktop
re-configures and stretches or contracts, even if the HDMI on the
Panasonic is not the current display, but I can live with that.

Of course the full HDMI graphics card now properly supports HDCP. I used
to be able to copy my wife's recorded television from her Media Centre
2005 PC across to mine to watch programmes she had recorded. Now the DRM
kicks in on all my monitors and I can't watch the BBC's protected
content - they have set the protected flag in the DVR-MS file format.
There is a work-around - I convert to MPEG2 using a program called
DVRMStoMPEG. This conversion is quite quick because it would appear that
DVR-MS is MPEG2 in thin disguise - the disguise being metadata for DRM and
the like. So recorded Freeview is now automatically archived to DivX every
night, stored on a NAS box and ready to watch on the plasma the following
day. A program called MCEBuddy works well here.

All in all a success, but several days of playing around to get it all to
work reliably together. Fell free to hurl more questions my way if you
want to go this route, or if you want to find out what life with a
Panasonic Freesat plasma is like. That wasn't without its pain either -
but more along the lines of skinned knuckles swapping the LNB on my dish
for a quad...

Hope this helps,

David Slee

Thank you David for your describing your solution in such wonderful detail.
I shall study it keep it in a safe place for future reference!

Malcolm

How old is the Dell PC? The newer ones have "dual video cards" but the
second port is not exposed unless you buy a small card costing about
20quid. This exposes a DVI adapter which I believe you can then buy a
small DVI/HDMI adapter. the sound will have to travel the old way via RCA
connectors!

Paul DS.

I should add that I'm referring to the video cards on the motherboard here.
Many Dells also shift with third party graphics cards (better for games) but
if you don't need this performance, the on-motherboard card will often
support two monitors, if you buy the small daughter board.

I don't know whether you can enable both a third party and on-motherboard
graphics at the same time - perhaps someone else can comment?

BTW, if you don't need the extra performance, you can save yourself some
money by calling and getting the third party card removed from the standard
Dell build. You will need to check that your model has on-motherboard
graphics (never found one that doesn't) and the operator at the other end
will be confused and claim you need a graphics card - but you'll know
better!

Paul DS.

Andy Burns wrote:
Ron Lowe wrote:

The RGB voltage levels are very slightly different, but not enough to
concern us. We can wire the RGB srtaight through.

The difference is inthe sync.
The H+V sync are seperate on VGA, and need to be combined into a
composite sync. The circuit 2/3 way downthis pace will do the job.

http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/RGB_Scart

I'd imagine any useable VGA-SCART cable will perform this task, like
the one I indicated.

Yes if you combine the sync pules, it *can* work, but only if you can
set the card to output a "TV compatible modeline" e.g. 720x576
interlaced 50Hz, in general Windows can do it, Linux can on *some*
cards, Something called PowerTop(?) might help for windows.

Powerstrip.


Be careful, you could damage the TV.

"Dave Plowman (News)" wrote in message
...
In article ,
R. Mark Clayton wrote:
How old is the Dell PC? The newer ones have "dual video cards" but
the second port is not exposed unless you buy a small card costing
about 20quid. This exposes a DVI adapter which I believe you can then
buy a small DVI/HDMI adapter.

That isn't an adapter just a cable HDMI is backwards compatible with
DVI, except DVI has no sound as below.

You do need to be careful. Not all DVI/HDMI cables are the same.

Should be.

OTOH not all Scart cables are the same...


--
*Pride is what we have. Vanity is what others have.

Dave Plowman London SW
To e-mail, change noise into sound.

In article ,
R. Mark Clayton wrote:
You do need to be careful. Not all DVI/HDMI cables are the same.

Should be.

No - there are different layers of connection. I know this after searching
for a short one. It didn't work with my combination. Think it was said to
be for a Playstation or similar. It was cheap, however. IIRC, you can tell
by looking at the plug - the one I had trouble with had a bank of pins
absent.

OTOH not all Scart cables are the same...

I'd say it's a similar thing. A fully populated SCART will work for say
composite but a composite only one won't for RGB, etc.

--
*Never miss a good chance to shut up *

Dave Plowman London SW
To e-mail, change noise into sound.

JR wrote:

Andy Burns wrote:

Something called PowerTop(?) might help for windows.

Powerstrip.

That's the one.