How Can I hook up to a tv through svideo

My dad has a 36 Inch RCA television, with a Svidio port on the back, I connected the TV and my laptop but there was no video going to the tv. I use a ATI X1400, and went into the pannel and selected to turn the tv on, but still no signal, is there a special trick to it?

 

1.) Unless it is an LCD/Plasma TV, the quality will be poor.

2.) Many laptops require a fn key combination to switch between display modes. Mine is fn + F8.

 

1) I can vouch for the poor quality in my experience. It may be fine for the desktop and doing a demo on how to open a file in MS Word, but video quality is very weak on a non-LDC/plasma at least.

2) Yep. After you configure any ATI settings if necessary, I had to use my Funcation combination on my laptop to get the screen to switch over to the TV.

 

It took me a while to get the settings right for it to work, but you just have to play with the setting enough. The only thing that I have glitches with is that I can not watch any movies from my hard drive. I can play them from the internet or a DVD, but I want to watch things like dl.tv and the old tech tv stuff that I have. Sorry about taking this thread, but I have the same type of TV and can not figure it out, anyone know???

 

The reason that S-Video will look poor is because it is limited to 480i.

 

oooo i didnt play around with the fn+f8 key, i'll try that later, so the quality will be bad? he also has a 25ish inch lcd screen, would that be decent?

 

S-video is only appropriate for connecting to CRT standard-def screens. For connecting to things like LCDs and Plasmas, especially ones which support high-def, the best thing to do is connect the VGA monitor output of the computer into the VGA input of the TV, if it has one, or even better connect the comps DVI to the TV's DVI or something. If it doesn't have that I think you can buy VGA to Component cables which is a better picture quality than S-vid.

 

I had spent some time hooking up TV's to S-video outputs of the ATI cards, and it is never quite straightforward (in my experience).
The tricks are:
1. You need to activate the S-Video output channel (second monitor) as a clone of your primary monitor.
2. I have had a problem where I would get a copy of the primary monitor on the TV, but the Nero Vidoe Player screen would be blank (would not show a video played on the primary monitor). It turns out that there is Video Settings section in ATI Catalist or whatever utility is used for secondary monitor configuration, and I had to set it to Theater Mode to a get the video to play on TV.

 

Yeah, I'd also mess around with different output settings. I must say though, as much as people are complaining about output resolution, outputting to a normal tv is excellent for Media Center--when you go through the setup you can have it optimized for a tv. Everything looks fairly crisp and legible, and TV going through my tuner card to the tv looks just about as good as normal tv...