S-video Out Resolution

[palmertech]

Would the pandora be able to output a perfect 800x480 clone of its screen to an LCD tv that resolution via the S-Video line?

Thank you.

 

[mali]

S-video has got a lower resolution.

 

[Squidge]

S-Video supports Standard definition only, not high definition. Therefore it's limited to 480i or 576i, depending on country.

 

[mindlord]

S-Video supports Standard definition only, not high definition. Therefore it's limited to 480i or 576i, depending on country.

According to these Nvidia geeks:
CODE
http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=89470

and
Wikipedia:
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-Video

As long as the pixel clock and the target display support it, S-Video is capable of resolutions up to 700 x 486 NTSC and 700 x 576 PAL.

However, there is also this:
QUOTE
When used for connecting a video source to a video display where both support 4:3 and 16:9 display formats, the PAL television standard provides for signaling pulses that will automatically switch the display from one format to the other. The S-video connection transparently supports this operation. The S-Video connection also has general provision for widescreen signaling through a DC offset applied to the chrominance signal; however, this is a more recent development, and is not widely supported.

Which suggests with some creative Xorg modelines 800x480 might be achievable on compatible displays. Interesting indeed.

 

[Chip]

The "theoretical" max resolution for S-video is a bit misleading. Technically, NTSC and PAL do not have a horizontal resolution. You can try to cram as much detail into a horizontal scanline as you want (it is an analog waveform after all), but you lose differentiation around 600-700 "dots" or so. There is a definite number of vertical lines you can display, but due to overscan, you may lose some of them on older TVs.

You should, in theory be able to send a 800x480 image to the video out circuitry which should show up correctish on your widescreen TV, assuming the TV can stretch an S-video signal to fill the screen. You will not get a nice crisp picture like you would with VGA or any other pixel-perfect format, but it should be more than adequate for games and videos. Text should be fine as well, as long as the font is not too small. Anybody who has hooked a computer to a TV over S-video at 640x480 or 800x600 should know what to expect. Both are technically higher resolution than S-video can handle, but they do work (for a given value of "work").

 

[palmertech]

Thanks for the awesome answers, trying to decide if using this 8" LED backlit display I have would work as a pandora netbook component (Dock pandora, USB keyboard, all that jazz.)

I am close to getting a netbook instead, so if I can get that to work reasonably well, it would be the swing factor.

 

[darkblu]

The "theoretical" max resolution for S-video is a bit misleading. Technically, NTSC and PAL do not have a horizontal resolution. You can try to cram as much detail into a horizontal scanline as you want (it is an analog waveform after all), but you lose differentiation around 600-700 "dots" or so. There is a definite number of vertical lines you can display, but due to overscan, you may lose some of them on older TVs.

why what you say it true, do not forget that for some time now tv sets, including non-HD ones, have been digital internally, handling analogue sources as a pre-stage to their native modus operandi. naturally, such tv sets would perform some form of ADC, and when doing that they could use as a guideline the ATSC specs, which define the widescreen SD digital matrix as 704x480, ergo the tv sets may not bother providing more than 704 discrete columns per picture when fed from an analogue SD source like s-video. or IOW, we may never seen more than 704 columns, even though the physical output resolution of widescreen SD is 848 columns.

 

[Esn]

If a movie file has a different resolution (let's say 488x360 or something), would the Pandora be able to scale it up (or down) to the correct resolution so that it would appear to take up the whole screen on the TV, while keeping the aspect ratio correct? (maybe with black bars along the sides if it's not 1.33:1)

P.S. I still have an analogue TV... it is very old, but still works well.

 

[Eniko]

Anybody who has hooked a computer to a TV over S-video at 640x480 or 800x600 should know what to expect. Both are technically higher resolution than S-video can handle, but they do work (for a given value of "work").
So if you make a game running at the Pandora's native resolution without pixel doubling, expect that it will not look good on some TVs?

 

[Alpha2]

Any old game being run on an HDTV is going to look crappy even if you stretch it to fill the screen. Considering every emulatable system the Pandora could possibly play are all SD res it's not likely the video out would ever be able to compensate.

Native Pandora games wouldn't be much better despite possibly having higher resolutions since most games would still be sub-HD res.

 

[Mark1970]

The first years of this century I did experiment with connecting my computers to PAL TV's and it was possible to display something like 800x600 with TV-out on a simple Nvidia/Ati card - it does flicker and the small text is not readable but for video or games it was actually quite nice. On NTSC your best shot is 640x480.
I did have a 40" NTSC Philips TV that came with a VGA-in connector which was excellent for Mame. It died on me a couple of months ago.
Using the Pandora TV-out to display emulated older video game systems is nice, but not all modern LCD TV's scale the limited signal well. The older CRT Sony Trinitrons displayed the F100/F200 gp2x svideo-out very well. I think you can expect the same from a Pandora.