CRT TV for MP (1 Viewer)

culle

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February 22, 2007
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Hi there
In lack of possibilities to get an LCD TV i have to use some CRT TV for living room.
I have composite and scart connectors on TV and i was wondering which one is better?
And how it will look since the resolution is pretty much lower that regular screens?
 

Larzon

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    I never heard of SCART, so you got me curious. (It is not used in US.)

    From a quick read here it looks like SCART can be better because it can carry s-video and RGB.
    SCART - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

    This of course assumes you have a source that provides s-video or RGB to the cable and that the TV is capable of receiving one of these better signals.

    <edit>
    I'm guessing picture quality should look like a good DVD. It depends on how you get your signal out of computer, e.g. do you have to use a converter box to create analog TV signal from VGA ouptut.
     

    JackTramiel

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    AW: CRT TV for MP

    Movies should look ok on a crt. The quality should be better with scart as long as it is a full scart connection.
    As far as i know there are not much graphic cards providing that signal.
    However people used htpcs before the big flat screen time has started and were quiet happy.

    Getting a skin looking good on such a resolution might become tricky.
     

    Larzon

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    Getting a skin looking good on such a resolution might become tricky.
    Very true. I assume skin Blue3 will be used, as it is designed for a 4:3 aspect ratio and presumably smaller screen sizes. I just checked and the default font heights are bit larger for that skin.

    culle, if text is too small for your TV,

    1) try increasing the DPI setting in Windows: Display Properties > Settings > Advanced, maybe try DPI = 120,

    2) and if you still need to go larger within MediaPortal itself, you can try increasing the font heights of the skin. Note there is a limit to how far you can go before text starts to "spill over" the graphic elements in the skin.

    I once did both of these things for a smaller LCD TV and it worked quite well. I was using Blue3wide in that setup, so the default font sizes were about 80% of nominal, and I boosted them to 120%. (E.g. for font10 the default height was 8, and I increased it to 12.)


    Following is from my own notes on editing font size, polished a bit for this post. (Seems I have to write most things down nowadays lest I forget how and what I did. :rolleyes: )

    *** Increase font height ***
    Go to folder \Documents and Settings\\All Users\Application Data\Team MediaPortal\MediaPortal\Skin\Blue3
    - Make a copy of the file fonts.xml (in case the editing goes wrong).

    1. Open fonts.xml with Notepad.
    2. For a given font, find the height element and edit the value. Make sure to edit only the height, not the name.

    For example, for font10 you would look for
    <name>font10</name>
    and then look below it to find the height element. Increase the height value by, say, 120% ( 10 x 1.2 = 12 for this case)*.
    <height>12</height>

    3. Repeat step 2 for the other fonts**.
    4. Save the file. (It is OK to keep it open in Notepad.)
    5. Open MePo and see your results.

    6. Close MePo.
    7. If further adjustments are needed, start again from step 1.
    8. When finished, be sure to save a backup of your modified fonts.xml elsewhere on your computer.

    *Note 1: For uniformity increase each height by the same percentage. Fractional font values are not allowed, so for each calculation just round to nearest whole number, e.g. 14 * 1.2 = 16.8, so use 17.

    **Note 2: Initially when you are testing to find the best percentage to use, save time by just editing font10 through font14. These are used most frequently in the skin.

    One last tip here -- if you really get into editing skin xml files, look up the MyRefresh plugin. It really speeds thing up.
     

    Spragleknas

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  • December 21, 2005
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    Hi.
    SCART is a European (stupid) thing, which is not very well supported by PC cards - as well as much other equipment. SCART inputs might often accept s-video input. If your does, this is probably the way to go.

    Regarding analogue picture quality, I think it is like this:
    VGA (often called "PC-input" on TV's)
    Component (red, green and blue plug)
    "SCART" (RGB-type)
    S-video
    Composite (yellow input often named "video")
     

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