Component video on Bluray--worth it?

G

ghostchamber

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Jun 19, 2003
Messages
1,187
Forgive me if this has already been answered. I did a brief search and didn't come up with anything definitive.

In a nutshell, my wife and I have decided we are sick of outrageous cable prices. She read an article and came to the realization that all the shows we watch are available the next day online, and as such keeping around the cable box and DVR at the outrageous prices we pay is not worth it. There's also some issues with Comcast--supposedly canceling a $25 service reduces your bill by $10.

So we have more or less decided to build a HTPC. I threw around some prices of a few builds, but my wife suggested we test it out with my spare computer. Aside from an issue with the ATI component video-out displaying in black and white, everything looked fairly good. I am going to test the waters a bit further using a DVI-to-component adapter I bought from monoprice.com (for $3.50 it's worth a shot), but it's looking like something we might actually do.

Now my question is this: is it worth it going Bluray if your best option is component video? Our TV can only do up to 1080i, so I understand that I won't get the full benefit (but it's an older TV and I'm looking towards the future). But there are no DVI or HDMI connections, so component video is the only way to go. I am considering ordering a bluray drive for this HTPC, but I wonder if the picture quality is noticably different. Has anyone been using Bluray with component video?

Also, I read about something called ITC which supposedly can be set to throttle back component video connections to 480p, but I cannot seem to verify whether this has actually been implemented or not.

Any help would be appreciated, and forgive me if I've asked anything that gets answered a lot.
 
If you use AnyDVD HD, It'll take off anything like the ITC and the HDCP and it'll let you run it over component(or in my case, a non-HDCP DVI port)

It's how I do it on my system and it works just great. Grab the internal Blu-Ray/HD DVD Drive and you're set!
 
Excellent. Thank you for the response!

Now, I just need to prove to my wife that it's worth it. She doesn't see the difference in Bluray.
 
I think it takes a side-by-side comparison to really notice the difference blu-ray makes. Maybe take her to a Best Buy on a slow day and get a salesperson to demo it.

As far as the ATI card only outputting black and white, it sounds like it's set to composite out, instead of component. Might have to dig through the settings to get it to display the right signal.

As for Comcast, it's probably bundling [bungling?] that is causing your bill to be screwed... they often offer "expensive" features for less when you have more stuff combined, so reducing some of your features just means other ones increase in price.
 
To answer the question, yes bluray is definitely worth it, even over component. My HTPC is connected to my rear projection HDTV by component as that's all it has. Even my wife, who never notices anything says she can tell a difference between bluray and DVD. To me, the sound is what's most awesome. To my knowledge, the ITC-thing has not been implemented on any movies, and if it does, just grab AnyDVD HD. It's a good program to have regardless, any way.
 
ghostchamber said:
I am going to test the waters a bit further using a DVI-to-component adapter I bought from monoprice.com (for $3.50 it's worth a shot), but it's looking like something we might actually do.
Click to expand...

You are not "converting" DVI to component for $3.50. That just is NOT going to happen.

You have to realize the the DVI connector supports both digital signals (technically referred to as DVI-D) and the old VGA standard (technically referred to as DVI-A). When you put both in the same connector, you get what is known as DVI-I (DVI-D + DVI-A_. So what you are doing with that connector is basically NOT use the digital signal but the ye-old VGA signal. Also, lets take this one step further. This dongle will not convert VGA (RGBHV) to Component (Y, Pr, Pb). All this dongle will do is support a video card with a DVI-I plug that supports VGA that can be reconfigured as component.

I hope you understand this.
 
Trepidati0n said:
You are not "converting" DVI to component for $3.50. That just is NOT going to happen.

You have to realize the the DVI connector supports both digital signals (technically referred to as DVI-D) and the old VGA standard (technically referred to as DVI-A). When you put both in the same connector, you get what is known as DVI-I (DVI-D + DVI-A_. So what you are doing with that connector is basically NOT use the digital signal but the ye-old VGA signal. Also, lets take this one step further. This dongle will not convert VGA (RGBHV) to Component (Y, Pr, Pb). All this dongle will do is support a video card with a DVI-I plug that supports VGA that can be reconfigured as component.

I hope you understand this.
Click to expand...
So what you're saying is that I won't get a component video signal this way?

EDIT:

If I am correct, how do I get an HD signal on my TV? Do I need HDMI and a new TV?
 
ghostchamber said:
So what you're saying is that I won't get a component video signal this way?

EDIT:

If I am correct, how do I get an HD signal on my TV? Do I need HDMI and a new TV?
Click to expand...

Is your TV even an HDTV? Even if not, most "good" video cards have a port on them that supports a component based dongle. The dongle has a somewhat specialized port that connects to the video card and you just need a normal component cable to the TV. The only issue in most cases is needing another monitor to configure the port first before you can run it standalone. However, with HDMI becoming the "demand" for HTPC type cards, the ye-old component port is going the way of dodo. Even more disturbing is quite a few modern TV's don't even have VGA ports anymore (only composite, component, svideo, and HDMI).
 
Trepidati0n said:
Is your TV even an HDTV? Even if not, most "good" video cards have a port on them that supports a component based dongle. The dongle has a somewhat specialized port that connects to the video card and you just need a normal component cable to the TV. The only issue in most cases is needing another monitor to configure the port first before you can run it standalone. However, with HDMI becoming the "demand" for HTPC type cards, the ye-old component port is going the way of dodo. Even more disturbing is quite a few modern TV's don't even have VGA ports anymore (only composite, component, svideo, and HDMI).
Click to expand...
Yes, it's an HDTV. It's a few years old (got it in 2003), but we have a slew of HD cable channels. We've got two component inputs, which are being used by our DVD player and our cable/DVR box.

As I said earlier, I have a spare computer with an x850 Pro that I hooked up, but it only displayed in black and white (and it was late at night so I made no configuration changes to try and fix it). It might have the "specialized" port that you're referring to. It looks suspiciously like an s-video port, but it actually came with a cable that turns it component (not sure if that's ATI proprietary). My 8800GT on my main computer has two DVI and an s-video out, and that's it.
 
So I got the dvi-to-component cable in today, and lo-and-behold, it doesn't really work. You see bits of a display, but it is completely distorted and dancing across the screen. Hardly conducive to selling my wife on this whole idea.

Just for ha-ha's, I reconnected the ATI proprietary component video out, and it wasn't displaying in B&W anymore (maybe a cable was loose last time). So it was full color, and it looked fairly nice, but I couldn't get the resolution right. Every resolution was too big. Even 640x480 didn't fit right (the taskbar was over halfway off screen). I messed around in the ATI Control Center a bit, but it was taking up the whole screen and was difficult to navigate around in. I actually couldn't press the apply button on certain screens because it was off screen and I couldn't drag it on.

What odd is when I connected the S-video on my 8800GT (my main computer) it displayed fine. It wasn't the best quality, but it worked, and it allowed me to select a widescreen resolution, which I remember correctly was 960xSomething (I don't have a widescreen monitor so I can't tell you what the resolutions are).

Thoughts anyone?
 
With the ATI card, try to make a custom resolution of 1776 x 1000 (I think it's 1000). I have a 1080i rear projection and when I started my HTPC early on, this was the resolution that worked best for me. But now Catalyst has a better way.
 
Sometimes to get the resolution, etc right on my TVs I've had to bring a 2nd monitor to plug in. That way you can see the menus clearly.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top