OK, my TV is a 28" LCD with lots of scarts, VGA, DVI, s-VHS, and composite inputs and my graphics is an nvidia FX5500 with (I think) MPEG decoder and s-VHS output. Are there any benefits to using s-VHS over VGA?

Ross

OK, just found out that s-VHS is by far the best option, apart from the normal fuzzy top few lines it is almost as good as viewing the TV via the coax feed if viewing from at least 8ft. Not bad at all.

There is no such connector as S-VHS. I think you are talking about S-VIDEO. You should be using the VGA or DVI input on your TV not s-video.

Well I disagree, using s-video gives me a superb picture with almost no visible artifacting and widescreen seems to work without any tinkering, not so with VGA (I don't have DVI on the graphics card so can't try that). The only benefits I can see from using VGA is that sound is better (my TV has seperate PC audio tied to the VGA connector and line-in for the s-video but no line-out from the PC) and of course everything is clearer when using it as a PC but seeing as I use xterm on my laptop to configure it then its not a problem.

VGA should be loads better than s-video. What is the native resolution of your lcd?

The problem is your TV is scailing the picture. How about you read the manual that came with your TV and reconfigure the Xfree86 server on knoppmyth to use the native resolution of your TV. That will give you the best picture quality.
[/quote]The only benefits I can see from using VGA is that sound is better (my TV has seperate PC audio tied to the VGA connector and line-in for the s-video but no line-out from the PC) and of course everything is clearer when using it as a PC but seeing as I use xterm on my laptop to configure it then its not a problem.[/quote]
What is "PC audio"? Do you mean a 1/8th inch headphone jack like PC sound cards usally use?

Your computer doesn't have line-out! So you are using the PC speaker to listen to all your shows. That must sound horrible.

The signal output from a PC's sound card is line-out. If you need to plug it into a pair of RCA jacks on the TV you can get a cable that has a 1/8th inch headphone connector on one side and a pair of RCA plugs on the other. It is the same signal electronicaly.

well my pc has no line out, so I have to use the speaker connection, I'm quite aware that a line-out would be much better, but in fact if I used it with VGA then it wouldn't work very well as my TV PC-audio connection expects to use the PC speaker connector. My TV does 1280x768, and yes I could set up Xfree to use that, but it really does look better on s-video, I can only assume it is something to do with the mpeg decoder on the video card as when using VGA it looks quite awful, with lots of pixelation, as if a s/w decoder is being used. I've turned off the autosize and VGA is still pretty bad but I'll try again this weekend.

What is autosize? No nvidia cards have mpeg decoders built into them. Even if it did knoppmyth doesn't support it. And why would it not be used when you use the VGA connector? The video card rasterizes the image to one frame buffer before sending the image to either the VGA or s-video connector.

I think your s-video output is blurring the picture. It has to downsample the framebuffer to about 640x480 before outputting onto the s-video port. This acts like a primitive form of anti-aliasing. So you don't see the pixelation as much. If that looks better to you then by all means keep using the s-video output. But it certainly is not providing the best signal to your TV.