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Originally Posted by thermopyl
Hi
As part of my upcoming MCE PC setup, I have been doing some research...
Can anyone tell me if they have connected their Samsung STB to an ATI card (or other) using a scart to s-video cable? Do you get colour or black and white on the PC?
If B&W did you use a convertor (say from Maplins) to sort this out?
Cheers
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Not a Samsung or a 9800Pro, but I have a Pace box running into a 9700 Pro AIW and a 7200 VIVO ATM, using SCART to composite leads. Quality can be excellent, but requires a reasonably good cable. All singing and dancing; all colour. Don't forget you need to connect the audio leads as well as the video.
In both cases I'm using ATI's MultiMedia Center (ouch! I hate American mis-spellings!), which works excellently but may be a problem for you if, as I suspect, your card is an OEM. Both the cards I'm using are Built by cards; my experiences suggest that the MMC TV/Video In app won't install on OEM cards and, if it can be persuaded to install, won't run. A possible workaround for this is to edit the card BIOS to identify it as a Built by ATI card, but this may not work anyway, and shouldn't be attempted without some flashing experience.
If you can't use MMC (worth trying; it's free to download and use except that you need a Catalyst CD for the DVD Player), you want to be careful what other software you go for, as few of them are free... ;-(
Unfortunately, most TV software manufacturers, for me, don't seem to have optimised their products for PAL/SECAM video, and the picture quality tends to be bad. The only two I've found that give a good picture (apart from MMC, which I'd say is the best quality of all) are WinDVR and Showshifter. Of these, I'd recommend WinDVR; Showshifter has excellent picture quality, but an awful, clunky interface that I had a hard time with.
And the obvious disclaimer: YMMV