Question about plugging computer into TV

[VS Omega]

Hey all.

I know how much fun it can be sometimes to plug the PC into the TV in the lounge and play games like that because of the surround and big screen (my desk lacks both of these lol)..

I've done it a lot in the past but it was always with S-Video on the old TV and usually cloning (doing it right now with bedroom TV, cloning it). My graphics card came with a component cable so I could use the red green and blue connectors, and I tried that out in the lounge and it was pretty bad. The quality was excellent, but none of my direct 3d based games would even start up, coming up with a lot of kooky fun errors.

With the component I also had to adjust the overscan settings a lot and even then it was upsetting because there were still very slight black bars around the picture. I was able to set windows and things that did work to widescreen resolutions though.

What I'm wondering is: Would a DVI to HDMI cable produce much better results than the component cable or should I expect the same sort of things? Because I'm considering getting one if it will make the TV act like a monitor and I could just plug the PC straight into it, no worries about overscan or D3D being broken.. My thinking is because I would be using one of the two DVI ports on the graphics card it would think it's a monitor instead of the HD-Svideo port where it knows it's a TV. The TV also has an analog monitor port but I don't reckon that's a good thing, quality wise?

Any, and I mean ANY advice welcome.. I know the HDMI cable should at least allow for slight better picture quality because it's a digital signal at all times, no conversion to analog then back to digital like component cable does, but not really worth it if I can't play my games and stuff. I also know the DVI to HDMI cable won't be able to carry the audio signal, only the video, that's cool though..

Running Windows Vista, Graphics is a 7900GS using with either 96.33 or 97.46 drivers (both are in the folder forgot which one didn't work)

 

[MarzVP]

Juzza you make it sound really hard to do now I dont know if I want to try it any more:cry: :cry: :cry:

 

[VS Omega]

Marz it's not as complicated as I'm making it sound, if you're going to hook it up to a SD television you shouldn't have troubles what so ever and it'll work great, I only experienced issues with some games not working and there being black bars on the HDTV in the lounge (the drivers for the graphics card fixed the black bars a lot with settings for "overscan" and pan and scan crap)

Works awesome in here and using cloning or spanning (clone will have the same image on both spanning will let you have a big desktop space)

 

[pro_gmh]

using ur DVI port would be much better, i use the s-video on my lappy sometimes to clone and sometimes to duel but i notice on somte tv's the colours bleed. my lappy also have a DVI-D port and that being digital i would assum is be much better than the svideo and componet coz there both anolouge arnt they?

 

[VS Omega]

Component is sort of digital/analog because the signal gets converted to an analog signal to be broadcast across the cable then recreated as digital again (I THINK, not 100% about how it works)..

I don't have a problem with the quality that I was getting with the component cables (Y Pb Br), mainly concerned with the computers functionality as a result of that, and if it thinks it's a monitor then it theoretically should work like a monitor.. BUT I HATE OVERSCAN , and coming back to the desktop afterwards it's just troublesome