[mythtv-users] Supervideo and miniplug to RCA

[jarpublic at gmail.com]

On Thu, Feb 26, 2009 at 11:34 AM, gonzalo diethelm <gdiethelm at dcv.cl> wrote:
> I want to (temporarily) use an old laptop as a front-end. It is an old
> Asus, and the (old) TV has one set of RCA inputs (the typical ones:
> yellow for video, red and white for audio).
>
> For video, the laptop has a supervideo output and I have seen cables at
> Radio Shack that convert from supervideo to RCA; these cables have no
> circuitry in between, just a piece of wire with a supervideo plug on one
> end and a RCA plug on the other. Do these cables work, or do I need a
> more sophisticated video converter?
>
> The laptop has a single miniplug output for audio, marked as S-PDIF
> (from memory). Will it work if I plug another simple cable with a stereo
> miniplug on one end and two RCA plugs on the other? What happens to the
> sound amplification / impedance in this case?
>
> Thanks for any hints and best regards.

I hooked my laptop up to my TV the other day using an svideo to
composite cable. The cables work fine. You need to make sure that you
have things setup correctly in your xorg.conf file. Make sure you have
the TV standard set correctly. I always get confused when using the
converter cable if I need to set the output to svideo or to composite.
Try them both to see what works. If you have that set wrong I think
you will just make the image black and white until you get it right.
You don't want to use S-PDIF for analog RCA inputs. S-PDIF is for
passing digital audio along so it can be decoded/amplified by another
device. I find it hard to believe your laptop doesn't just have a
standard headphone jack. Use the headphone jack and with a standard
converter for the red/white RCA.