TV problem

[Andy Dingley]

Home cinema buffs - wanabee hi-fi nuts who still need it in pictures.

[Dave Plowman]

Hi-Fi with a gimmick.

[Dave Plowman]

As a vaguely related point, the Savacentre in Merton have got DVD recorders for 225 quids. Will also play pretty well any CD sized format. And use ordinary DVD-R or RW.

[Steve Walker]

Probably frame rate. If I play region 2 DVDs, I get 25 fps and all is well, region 1 DVDs play at 30 fps and still display fine on my tv, but not if the signal is passing through the video recorder first. The video seems to sync. to the signal fairly well, giving a passable quality, steady picture, but it loses the colour. As the picture quality is a bit down, I assume that the synchronisation is not good enough and the colour's being lost.

This is all guesswork though, I don't have very much knowledge of the detailed operations of tv signals.

Steve W

[Marcus Fox]

You can get a DVD+-RW for a computer and a TV-in/out card for just over half that. Most DVD players play DVD-+RW discs now anyways. Ask on uk.adverts.computer.

Marcus

[Dave Plowman]

Not a lot of use if you wish to record in RGB off Freeview or satellite. Or indeed just watch a DVD on the TV, rather than computer. I'm intending using it to replace a VHS, and it has all the same (or better) timer facilities.

[Marcus Fox]

Thought that's what the TV card was for?

Marcus

[Mark Evans]

Have you tried disconnecting it from the mains for a few minutes?

[Mark Evans]

If you play a video file on a computer it never exists as composite video. Televisions tend only to accept composite video + composite sync (in the case of an S-VHS lead the composite video and composite sync actually go down different wires.)

In order to create composite video the R,G,B (or more likely Y, U, V) signals need to be encoded using either NTSC, PAL or SECAM.

[Mark Evans]

It's not this simple, PAL, NTSC & SECAM are colour encodings, not frame rates. This tends to confuse a lot of people though.

[Mark Evans]

Which is most likely to be colour encoded using PAL or SECAM. There is nothing preventing this being used to generate NTSC encoded composite video.

Since PAL is effectivly NTSC v2 most modern PAL chipsets will handle either encoding.

Perfectly possible, since the line and frame oscillators are not free running. Though the right hand edge of the picture might well be missing with a black bar at the bottom of the screen.

[Dave Plowman]

Composite video is just that - everything down the one cable.

S-Video is separate luminance (Y) and chrominance (C), with the syncs on the Y circuit.