Multi-Monitors

ToastyCheesy

Hello.
I recently got a TV and since I have had no use for it. I decided to hook it up to my computer as a Secondary display. It works great, better than what I expected. I use Windows Media Center to watch videos and stuff on it, but now I have a few questions.

I was wondering if I could get a program (shell extension, whatever) which will let me choose fullscreen programs to run on the secondary display instead of the primary, as Windows Vista does not have an option to do this. Also, things like text and videos look slightly grainy, or even blurry, more than what would be If I just had a DVD player hooked up to my TV. Any one have some good tricks for this?

My configuration is as follows:
ATI RADEON 9600 XT<->S-Video Cable(3 ft)<->RadioShack Coupler<->S-Video Cable (3 ft.)<-> 27" TV

I also plan on buying a TV tuner

Lupinthe3rd

Thats normal if your TV is a crt. Because they operate a little bit different to a crt pc monitor. Change to a LCD televsion if you don't want blurry text (but you might as well get a LCD monitor really if that were the case)

ToastyCheesy

ok, I just thought that maybe there was a program( like cleartype?) that would display the font differently.

Lupinthe3rd

hmmmm worth a try but as I say it's due to how TV's operate. Less fileds or something like that to an image, compared with a monitor.

BOD

Cleartype would make the problem worse if anything.

Bash

Try making the resolution smaller. Putting it around 640x480 should do the trick.

BlueSun

Yeah a standard TV's pixels are further apart than a PC monitors so theres fewer of them. Or atleast thats my understanding.

Its the whole point of getting HDTV's, so that you can see more pixels so the image looks clearer

You could think of your PC Monitor as an HDTV (if it had an HD Tuner in it, it would be :P)

anantha92

yea if you are really into it get a LCD HDTV like i did. 46" aint bad, very crisp and clear at 1368x768 (1.1 MP) although you can get the even beter 1080p tvs which support resos up to 1920x1080, which is really nice for playing games and watching movies in HD. Although the 1080 ones are VERY expensive and i say a 768 tv is enough, im more than happy of owning one .

ToastyCheesy

I came up with a solution.

First of all, for the text problem, I adjusted the TV's settings to the best possible, also made sharpness softer to improve text quality. Then in the Catalyst Control Center, I changed the S-video output to More (sharper) and that made the image quality improve greatly.

At first, there were big blue and yellow color blotches on the TV, but they went away.

The to get full-screen apps to run on the TV, I set te TV as primary monitor. But, since The TV desk space is alo smaller than my Monitor's Desk space, I dragged all my icons and the Task bar over to my monitor (which still remains the secondary monitor)

But thanks to all the people that helped me anyways.