Connecting Laptop to TV

Cantdance_2

Hi everyone,

As part of my money saving drive I'm looking to sell some bits and bobs and one of the things I was thinking of was my DVD player which also supports DivX (yes I have a separate DVD player just for that...!)

Anyway, since I have to spend ages running my DivX / Xvid files through MPEG4Modifier to get them to play properly on my DVD player I was thinking it might be easier just to play the files on my laptop - but I like the convenience of being able to play them on the big TV.

Anyone know how I can connect my laptop to an RGB / Scart socket on my TV? My laptop only has a monitor-type port on the back and no S-Video out.

Cheers!

James

gaming_guy

as far as i know no. you would need an s-video port to do that(svideo to scart lead). you could get a hd/lcd/plasma tv because most have the vga (monitor port), this would be the best option

Cantdance_2

Ah, that would be a shame if there wasn't a way to do it... I'd love an HD / LCD TV but that's the sort of thing I'd have done prior to becoming more money savvy (hence the ridiculous debt figures in my signature!)

Thanks anyway!

James

Kilty_2

Boxes do exist that allow you to convert VGA to RCA or SCART, I dont know how much they cost/how reliable they are though.

Cantdance_2

Thanks very much Kilty - a bit of google searching reveals that they would cost in the region of £60 which is about twice as much as I would get for my DVD player, LOL!!

So all in all I think it's best to stick with the DVD player....

James

Kilty_2

What kind of DVD player do you have btw?

I have one of those dirt cheap Amstrad DX3092s and it plays most DIVX/XVID without me having to do anything to them

garcia

I got a £20 Targa one from lidl a while back and it will play anything you chuck at it (except very high bitrates).

Cantdance_2

garcia wrote:

I got a £20 Targa one from lidl a while back and it will play anything you chuck at it (except very high bitrates).

Yeah I should probably have bought a cheapo one but at the time I got it there weren't any around... so I've got a Phillips model which plays everything fine except that if the sound is encoded with packed bitstream it makes the motion of the image very jerky.

So I have to re-encode the files to remove the packed bitstream. Reasonably quick but fiddly and annoying!

I also find it a pain in the bum to keep having to burn things to disc - it takes my PC about 10 minutes to burn a rewritable DVD.

I was thinking of getting a new one from Lidl / Aldi that has an SD card slot - does anyone know if these will play Xvids off the SD Card slot?

James

jimmyn

what about this..

http://www.maplin.co.uk/Module.aspx?ModuleNo=35258&criteria=usb%20tv%20out&doy=27m7