Video out to widescreen tv

[Superdaddy]

Well I think I have everything to five box tonight when I get home.

My problem is with the video for the four slaves, five monitors on my desk is not
an option as it is in the living room and my wife does not like WoW one bit.
I have a 50" widescreen mounted on the wall above my pc and was told to use
nvidia cards with svideo out to a security camera multiplexer and be able to see
all four slaves at once. The multiplexer has BNC inputs and svideo out but my
first test failed.

Is this a issue of digital vs analog? Is there a setting on each of the systems
to activate the svideo out? Is there a sub $300 option that is better without
using a wall of monitors?

Thank you

[emesis]

Sounds like you are hardware boxing, correct? Trying to get 5 PCs to display on a single TV-type display?

Svideo and BNC are both analog already, so even though you will get sucky resolution with this approach it shouldn't be an analog/digital conversion issue per se.

How are you getting from the svideo output on the PC to BNC input on the multiplexer? Something like this? http://www.svideo.com/svideo2bncmf.html

I don't know for your specific video card, but back in the day when I had a TV-out dispay adapter on my PC, I did in fact have to set the display properties to output signal on the svideo channel. Can you get one of the PCs to display on your 50" display using a straight-through svideo cable connection?

[Superdaddy]

Yes - five box all hardware, I just can't have four extra monitors on my desk and so I came up with that solution. The cables do look like that and were given to me by the security company.

I will try to set one pc at a time using svideo straight to the tv first to see if there is a setting in software. If I recall they are FX5200 cards. Are there other solutions in the sub $300 range?

Also when I looked for a setting in the nvidia control panel I couldn't locate it, I will google the setting when I get home.

Thanks for your help, I'm limited to my iPhone while at work.

[emesis]

I will try to set one pc at a time using svideo straight to the tv first to see if there is a setting in software. If I recall they are FX5200 cards. Are there other solutions in the sub $300 range?

Also when I looked for a setting in the nvidia control panel I couldn't locate it, I will google the setting when I get home.

I software box, so I'm not real familiar with your options. A KVM-type solution would give you much better display quality (assuming your display can take VGA/DVI input) but would only display 1 PC at a time.

I think the starting point is to verify that the issue is with the PC->svideo transition and not the downstream conversions (svideo -> BNC and multiplexer). I think it probably is.

I could be wrong, but I think you're going to get really poor quality video out of this, although it should work. One thing you could consider is a cheap video capture card for one of the PCs. System layout would then be as follows:

4 alt PCs -> svideo -> BNC -> multiplexer -> video capture card on lead PC.

Lead PC then drives the 50" display directly through VGA/DVI and runs WOW along with real-time video display. The quality on the alts will still suck but that's not a big deal. Quality on the main WoW window should be much better.

[Zzyzxx71]

I'm not sure if this is an option for your application, but back in the day I hardware boxxed 6 toons in DAOC. 6 monitors wasn't an option (especially since LCD's weren't bargain basement like they are now - CRT's all around), I could realistically only have 3 monitors.

I used 1 monitor for my main (bard), another for my healer (druid) and a 3rd monitor for the other 4 toons (animists) - but I had all the machines connected to the monitor via KVM. As long as your control of your slaves are solid, you have no problem.

The multiboxer motto in DAOC was "I don't need to see them to control them".

[Starbuck_Jones]

Generally the trick to getting video to display on a TV is that the TV has to be on when the system is booted and detected. TV's are notoriously bad at not being hot plug or plug and play. So basically, turn on the TV, change it to the correct input like S-video, then power on the PC. You should get video, if not, go to the display properties and make sure the TV is seen and is an enabled display.

I'm not sure how much your security hub thing will interfere with it. If the PC doesn't know that there is a TV hooked up to it, it wont push video out of that port. If you continue to have problems. Get it to work on one system and bypass the video hub thing, then work out from there.