media pc help

[Tom]

Mate of mine has bought:

Acer Aspire idea series (Media PC)

ATEC AV371DF (37" LCD telly).


Couple of issues. Hes using a skybox, we managed to get the PC to control the sky box, and we can see the picture going through it. Thing is that when the PC is in normal channel mode, the skybox picture is poor quality monochrome, and squashed 4:3. When we switch to AV input on the PC, the image is better and in colour, but its cropped and squashed 4:3. Its not the telly as the graphics from the PC are all in 16:9, and they look fine. The same output from the skybox into the telly produces a perfect colour 16:9 picture


Any ideas? Skybox is connected via SCART (yes we've tried different cables and sockets). PC is connected to the telly via a DVI cable.

 

[Kryten]

sorry mate, could only cringe when I heard that.

Yeah, continuing my power supply fetish, those Acer units in their entirity are made by Hiper - and the power supplies in them are very, very, very prone to overheating and exploding. Popping open the case show's you why.

Anyway regarding the specific issue, and not in any way related to any power problem, what software is he using to acheive this? I'd certainly avoid the stuff Acer bundles (unfortunatley I can't remember who fits the TV cards and what they are).

If the sky box is connected via SCART, I'm going to guess theres an adapter involved to go from s-video to scart - these are often a little bit flakey, as are s-video cables themselves, and it's often a matter of luck which cable/adapter works and which wont - the most common fault is always a black and white picture but does include the symptoms you've explained.
If you don't get any luck out of that and assuming you are indeed using an svideo/svhs cable, try swapping it out for a plain composite cable. These will degrade the quality a little but if it's only for playing videos and games when you're sitting several meters away (I hope you are on a screen that size ) it won't make much of a difference. If however you're using windows/text stuff with it you might find it a bit too painful. In this case, best bet is march over to a decent shop and find the best quality s-video cable you can find.

Of course I'm assuming you've already tried making sure all settings are as they should be (i.e. the PC is operating with PAL ather than NTSC. That doens't matter too much when just simply outputting to a screen but going from a sky box to a PC, I just don't know. I think as you've tried other cables etc, it's possibly a software fault - so what tv card and software is it using?

 

[Tom]

Theres no s-video outputs on the Sky box though?

Its running Windows Media Centre.

Hadn't thought of the PAL/NTSC thing, but where would one change that?

I haven't got the foggiest idea what is inside it, he bought it off the shelf.

 

[Kryten]

Ah, fair enough - assume then it has the scart's and the wealth of other connections on the back of the unit, making it newer to the ones I've "had apart" :/ That *should* also eliminate any issues regarding cabling quality.

I'd be at a loss other than software issues but a little googling around brings up this forum thread:

Aspire iDea 500 - AVForums

 

[Guest]

i would say go into the sky settings and change the output from 16:9 to 4:3 then back again.....


i had that problem with mine, doing that fixed it.