Digital Media On Your TV

The previous post about the iPod got me wondering about the thousands of digital photos on my notebook hard disk and how I can display them onto my TV at a higher resolution than is possible with the iPod. So, on closer investigation of notebook I discovered that what I thought was a PS2 mouse port is actually and S-Video out port.


Wow, now that has possibilities.

As long as your TV has an S-Video In port then all you need is an S-Video cable to connect to your PC. If you have a cam-corder then you probably already have on.

The other thing you should do is connect your earphones port on your PC to the Audio In ports of the complimenting S-Video In port and pass the sound through to the TV system rather than in my case 2 pathetic little speakers on my notebook.

Firstly turn on your TV, select the input port that has the S-Video input, connect it to your PC's S-Video port and then turn on your PC.

Once booted up then right click on your desktop and select "Properties", then "Setting", then "Advanced" and you should have access to your Video Driver software. My Toshiba Tecra is an nVidia GeForce 6600. I have the option to select "Dual Screen" with the second screen being the TV. You need to select the video format the the TV accepts, which in my case is NTSC, PAL-N or PAL-M. You may have to play with settings to get it right for your particular TV-PC configuration.


So now to get some content. I have found the best and cheapest option is Google's Picasa, no.1 becasue it's free and no.2 because it does a really nice slide show but there is one trick. Go to Picasa's "Options", then "Slideshow" and un-check the "Do full-resolution slideshow" checkbox. TV's have a surprisingly low resolution of generally only 720 x 480 pixels. Therefore if your image is lets say 1600 x 1200 then it will not display on the TV.

I don't have a DVD player in the house apart from my notebook so we watch DVD's on the TV through the notebook.

I recently bought a subscription to Cricket Australia's Cricket Australia TV which gives me access to all games live for the Australian summer. Now I watch it on the TV laid up on the sofa with a beer in the hand rather than sitting at my desk watch my computer screen. Cricket is just not the same without beer!!

Basically whatever you can display on your computer you can display on your TV and it's impressive, especially digital photos on your TV in the comfort of your lounge room.