Why am I getting a distorted picture on my TV?

Joined
Feb 22, 2001
Messages
3,410
Reaction score
128
Points
915
Location
Stockport
I've been working for a week or so on getting MCE set up to operate on my TV.

I have my Vista PC with NVIDIA 7600 connected via S Video to my Sony 5200ES receiver then via S Video to my CRT TV. My telly's old but superb with no faults.

I have set up MCE using the automatic settings offered to me on MCE, having made sure it's configured for S Video etc, and it seems by and large to work well.

However, whether I'm playing from a disc on my DVD drive or from an (uncompressed) DVD ripped to my hard disk, I'm getting occasional imperfections. They're hard to describe, but it often appears as though there's a wobbly line running left to right, causing the upper part of the picture to be slightly offset from the lower. I have not been able to determine what conditions cause this eg bright or fast moving scenes. It seems quite random.

If I didn't know better I'd guess it might be a dodgy connection, but I know all the cables are OK and have swapped them round to make sure.

There are so many variables at play and I've discounted everything I can think of. Could anyone offer any ideas as to what they think might be the problem?
 
Anyone? This has really got me puzzled, and means MCE is useless to me as things stand.

I don't get these problems when I replay a DVD through Media Player, so it would appear not to be the cable, connections, TV or even the graphics card. (For some reason I can't play DVDs in MCE so can't test that).

Could it possibly be that my hard drive isn't up to the task?
 
S-video is never going to look very good.

Is your graphics card refresh rate a multiple of 25Hz (25/50/75/100)? If it were defaulting to 60 or 85Hz that could be a problem.
 
Thanks. S video is all I have that will connect my card to my TV though. The image is excellent in terms of sharpness and colour, it's just the obvious fault. And as I say, the fault isn't present when I use other players, just MCE.

I have 3 refresh rates available: 25, 60 and 75. It was set to 60Hz. I've tried it on the others and I still have the fault. It's worth adding, unfortunately, although 25 or 50 maybe better for the TV, 25 creates a stuttery picture on my PC monitor (I have my card connected to both my TV and monitor) and 75 creates a soft/blurry image on my monitor. There is no way of having different settings for the VGA output to my monitor and S Video to my TV. (As far as I know, there is no graphics card on the market that allows this, lord knows why not, I can't believe it's beyond the capability of the manufacturers and software designers.)

This is driving me :suicide:
 

The latest video from AVForums

Is 4K Blu-ray Worth It?
Subscribe to our YouTube channel
Back
Top Bottom