Re: Hooking up my TV to my computers s-video out. (Please help)

[Paul <nospam@xxxxxxxxxx>]

michalchik@xxxxxxx wrote:
>> An alternative render option, is "VMR9". That can work on two screens
>> at once. So give that option a try.
>>
>> And like anything, YMMV.
>>
>
> what is "vmr9" and "ymmv", for tha matter I am a little fuzzy on what
> an "alternative render option" is.

1) Open the preferences for the movie player.
2) There may be a rendering option in there. The options would be
    "Overlay plane" or VMR9. In Windows Media Player, it might be
    Tools/Options/Performance/Advanced.

YMMV is "your mileage may vary", which translated means your results
may be better or worse than the link I posted.

I'm not sure I can find a nice English description of the
difference between overlay and VMR. Overlay is a hardware
feature, but I've never been able to find a reference that
explained why there is only one overlay possible. Even though
video cards now are dual head, and effectively two channels
from head to tail, implying they could do two independent
things, without one channel needing to bother the other
channel. They even show in device manager, as two objects.
It just doesn't make sense to me, that they'd share a resource
between those two channels.

I think one possible feature of overlay planes, is perhaps
hardware can DMA into it directly, for stuff like TV tuner
cards and the like. So it may have applications where software
is not involved.

VMR is another means to get to the screen, but seems to
involve more references to DirectShow/DirectDraw/DirectX
than the overlay thing. It is more of a software path,
and makes more sense when a movie is being decompressed
in software, and rendered on the screen.

And as an end user, you can certainly test the feature, and
see whether the results are good enough to use or not. If
there is an uncorrectable color cast to the results, you may
end up going back to what you were doing.

You can see another example here.

http://thedesignspace.net/MT2archives/2006_10.php

Post back how it works out.

    Paul