TV to Comp

We have a small group in office which exchanges movies, either via DVDs, VCDs or more often than not rips. The problem with rips which are usually DivX or XviD, needs specialized DVD players which have the appropriate codecs. The time when I bought my DVD player, only Philips was reasonably priced and had this support. But I went with a Sony anyway and hence can't burn these rips to CDs and play on the DVD player. If I did want to play the rip on my DVD player, I had to do the below:

1. Get the ripped movie, some 700MB.
2. Split into 2, normal file split will not do, we need to have 2 valid video files.
3. Burn these two in VCD format onto 2 CD-RW's. This takes a lot of time, more than an hour.
4. Play the CDs. Sometimes the Audio and Video are out-of-sync and the whole effort will be waste, else you are good to view.

I then got a lappy from office which had S-Video out, which is a common thingy in the latest laptops. So, did some reading and could see many people using S-video to see home videos and photos. I thought this could also be used to see a movie being played on the comp(Many others in the world already knew this, I was just very slow ). All we need is a TV which is capable of either S-Video In or Y/Cb/Cr In. So, got myself a S-Video to 3-RCA cable and started off to test this on my TV. After a few undocumented tweaks on the lappy, I can now see stuff playing on my lappy on the TV screen. This saves me a lot of time considering what I used to do before.

Note: S-Video cannot support audio, so you need to connect the lappys audio out to your home theatre or TV audio in.

Its a good thing I changed my broadband plan to unlimited.

Categorized As:

• Timepass
• Tech