Split monitors

typeractive

Hi all,

I am thinking of building a new PC. In the past I have used dual screen monitors for work and it has became more of a necessity as opposed to a luxury simply because I am used to them!

Anyway, as I am looking to build a new PC, I was thinking that I could get a digital TV card, and use my PC to watch TV / DVD's etc on. That way I could pass on my old portable TV/Video player and seperate DVD player. Saving space and also energy. I'm trying to be more sustainable. Here's my 'problem' that I am hoping someone can help with:

Is it possible to dedicate monitor's to certain activities? That way I could output from a graphics card to my projector (maybe not the most sustainable piece of equipment...well environmentally speakign at least ) meaning I could watch telly / DVD's on my projector and continue to work upon my PC.

Does anyone know if this is possible / I have made myself clear? I could then run all my media and entertainment from one central resource. I was thinking of getting an external network drive that I could also share between my new PC and my apple mac as well - making documents accessible much easier (non dependent upon a machine to be switched on at all times).

Any thoughts on my ideas?

Thanks in advance for any help - it's appreciated!
:beer:

baby.better

As far as I know, a combination of PC+TV card is not as good as TV itself if you don't have luxury sets. As to the monitor splitting part, I guess you need to switch from various activities manually.

typeractive

any other thoughts on this?

Little_John

Yes you can say play a DVD on 1 screen and use the other for pc use.

it is done within graphics card settings and the program you use for playing DVD's I am sure that a TV card would have the option also. It is years since I played with a TV card I bought one to watch euro 96 on the PC and I could do multi screen etc with it back then but I was running multiple graphics cards then. now you can get dual head cards its even easier.

fwor

To add to the input from post #2 - I use a PC-based freeview card and view it on a standard 19" 1280x1240 resolution monitor, and the picture quality is excellent. I also have a similar setup in the lounge with a larger monitor and again the picture quality is as good as any LCD TV that I've seen.

Maybe the PC-based TV that baby.better saw was not set up properly (e.g. if you don't set the screen resolution the same as the monitor's "native resolution", the results can be bad...).

I've only briefly tried dual monitors on one graphics card, and the problem I had was that my card would not support different resolutions on each output, but I think this was a limitation of that specific graphics card (it was cheap!).