On Fri, 26 Feb 1999, Steve Rothanburg wrote:
> Christopher Fury wrote:
>
> > But X windows is horrible. Colors bleed and shimmer all over the place and
> > the video
> > is offset. If I disconnect the video pass through and connect the monitor
> > straight to my video card the problem goes away.
>
> There you have it. The bypass cables that come with that kit suck. I'm having
> that
> same problem here. My suggestion is to call Creative and complain. Maybe
> they've got
> replacement cables. Or buy a replacement cable. They look like they're just
> male to
> male video cables.
I also have an Encore Dxr2. When I'm at high resoultions (1280x1024) (but
not at 1024x768), I notice a slight ghosting effect, especially on
vertical lines (which a number of characters in our Roman alphabet seem to
have). I hate the idea of a pass-thru cable, you'll always get some
amount of noise with analog signals. I want my video card to be able to
do MPEG2 decoding and MP3 decoding (into Dolby Digital, of course) without
any additional cards (well okay, I'll settle for a sound card doing the
sound decoding). But alas, such video cards are probably about 9 months
away....
For now, I think you have a few choices:
1. Try to improve the pass-thru cable quality. Try adding ferite
cores (this seems to help a little, but not much). And/or try spending a
lot of money on a high quality male-to-male cable.
2. Do what I do, normally plug in the monitor's cable
directly into your video card, and everytime you want to view a DVD, put
back in the pass-thru. This is the cheapest solution and keeps the video
quality best. (Try not to short out your video cards if you're doing this
hot :)
3. Setup an A-B switch box and switch between the video card+MPEG2
decoder card and just video card (you'll probably need a Y-splitter cable
as well). This is more expensive than 2 and will probably introduce noise
as well.
4. Don't use the video pass-thru on the card. Only use the
S-Video or composite out to a TV. This is probably the best solution, but
does require a TV near your computer.
5. I suppose you could also complain to Creative, but I doubt that
will get you very far.
Cliff W. Draper Forte Software, Inc. (510) 869-3462
---------------------------- food for thought ------------------------
"Don't get suckered in by the comments -- they can be terribly
misleading. Debug only code." -- Dave Storer
