SKY HD on a US HD Ready TV

I'm trying to find out if there is a reasonable cost option for me to connect my SKY HD box to the Sony 40inch LCD TV (KDL-V40XBR1) that I brought back to the UK with me from the US. I thought HDMI would do the work but unfortunately, due to the difference in frame rates (50hz in the UK, 60hz in the US), all I get when connecting this way is a scrambled picture. The TV has a VGA input but this requires a 60hz analog signal. Is there a converter available that we will take a 50hz hdmi input and output VGA at 60hz?

[meansizzler]

Think your buggered there mate, don't think such a device exists, but I may be wrong..., only thing I can think of is that if you have a PC and a Sweetspot Capture Card, you can connect your set top box's to it "576 Interlaced Only via RGB/YUV" and then the pc to your display and the software provided will output and video form the set top box at 60 hz or any resolution you specify, the video will be upscaled to your displays res, but only works with standard deifinion..

Have you considered an Xbox 360, it outputs games at 60hz so its osmething to make use of your display, although dvd playback is limited to 50hz so it won't work, not sure about HD-DVD depends if they use 720@25/50P or 720@30/60P for encoding..

But you could always use your display as a pc monitor...

[ianh64]

A decent scaler may do what you are looking for.

How about these products... would either of them work. Both are on sale in the UK so should support conversion of digital HD to VGA. The question is, what would be the VGA output frequency?

http://www.keene.co.uk/multi.php?mycode=cp262h2

http://www.keene.co.uk/multi.php?mycode=PC1280HD

I've been told that a VISION FCSC2 DVI-D to DVI-I Scaler/Converter should do the trick....

http://www.lektropacks.com/view_item...38&&category=5

I'll let you know how I get on.

[Stephen Neal]

Scalers may do the trick - but the quality of the 50Hz to 60Hz conversion is likely to be "interesting" on moving content. Broadcasters pay £10,000s for HD standards converters to convert 50 to 60 and 60 to 50 - and even they don't do it perfectly.

Ironically - you CAN take a UK / European "HD Ready" display to the US (subject to the caveats about mains supplies and NTSC/ATSC tuners) - as the European "HD Ready" standard requires both 50 and 60Hz compatibility.

I've received the box and have it connected. It works pretty well. Only issue seems to be an occasional frame flicker that is hardly noticable. I tried all combinations and the flicker is more or less eliminated if the box is switched to output a 720p analog signal connected up via the VGA port to the TV. I'm sure that if I had a native UK HD tv side by side with this set up I would notice more of a difference, but this is better than using my US TV as an ornament!