TV-out from a GeForce4 gfx card? Help please

RowaN

Right... I've finally got a long enough s-video cable to link up my PC to my TV. My gfx card is a Nvidia GeForce4 Ti 4200. But all that shows on the TV screen is a colour bar test card thing. Any ideas? I ran the TV wizard thing from the geforce control panel, but that just converted the testcard into garbled flickering mess.

I LOVE COMPUTERS THEY ARE SO EASY TO USE!

Any help MUCH appreciated, cheers guys.

bluep

I dont know if its the same geforce control panel as mine, but it took a fair bit of fiddling to get it working - I went to the hotkeys section of the nvidia control panel and set a hot key for flicking through the different display modes, converted my s-video cable to a scart lead connection into the tv and it works. My pc is at the shop at the moment and my laptop has a ATI, otherwise I'd check if they did indeed have the same interface.

I would also make sure you have the most uptodate nvidia driver for your card, incase they've made it easier to connect up in a later driver version.

gavsto2005

What I have done at home is convert the s video into a composite lead adapter and plugged them into my tv, how are you plugged into the tv at the moment

RowaN

I am using the latest Forceware drivers. I'm plugged in via S-video lead (that goes into my TV's svideo socket, obviously). The connection is fine, because as I say, it shows the test card which my gfx card is outputting. Yet thats how it stays. Only after installing a 3rd party application called TV Tool did it start outputting anything useful... but even that was flawed: a clone of my desktop would show on my tv, but any dvd or video clip i played just appeared as an empty black box, even though it is displaying absolutely fine on my PC monitor!

Nvidia do not have a support e-mail/forum. Wonderful. I'm never buying an nvidia gfx card ever again. I've had other problems with nvidia cards.. not technical problems.. logical problems that could be sorted out if the programmers at nvidia had the brains to do so.

wolfman

Sounds like a problem with the video overlay. Older cards are a little harder to setup. You need to make sure your graphics card has dual head capability. Some older cards can only show the video on the primary display device, not the secondary, although that should be the case with a GeForce4.

I can't get into the "Advanced" display settings on my machine remotely and can't remember off hand, but you'll need to change something to do with the overlay settings in the nVidia panel.

Here's a good article for more info, http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1558,1674408,00.asp

bluep

Ah i know the solution to the "clone" black box problem
I had this too.
If on clone status, your monitor is set as primary and your tv as secondary, it will only show the video on your monitor and a black box on the tv. If you switch them around, it will play on your tv fine. I remember now, this one foxed me for a while til I fiddled around and found it worked the other way round. nVidia eh!

I must say their user interface is really crap for tv-out. My ATI radeon card on the laptop is very simple - alt F5 toggles between any display automatically - that's how it worked out of the box, didn't have to set anything.

RowaN

I finally got things working.. somewhat. Basically after 5secs of viewing a video on the TV screen, the pic goes distorted and starts rolling wildly - this is fixed by simply reclicking the desired resolution button in TV Tool. Obviously(!).