Errius wrote:What's a good way of piping VGA output to a TV? I'm temporarily working in the living room and there's a big old 1990s TV in the corner with RCA/S-Video inputs, and I was wondering if I could use it to watch movies. My video card has a spare VGA output.
Something like this would be the easiest way when you only have VGA (e.g. onboard video/laptops). Quality is more than adequate for something like watching movies.
On topic, I believe this is incorrect (in lieu of stronger language):
Hackaday wrote:VGA is a port that can still be found on the back of millions of TVs and monitors that will be shipped this year.
From what I've seen LCD TVs started dropping the VGA input a while ago, which started pissing me off to no end. I personally don't own any large LCD televisions, since my only use for a TV nowadays is to play low resolution video games which modern TVs can't display correctly, so I don't see the point of getting something that won't cater to my needs, instead opting to keep what does work (in this case, CRT SDTV).
Like many of you here I grew up in a time where television and computer displays were very different beasts - to me, television is synonymous with low resolution and poor readability, while computer displays are sharp and detailed - therefore they fulfill completely different roles and they don't mix well. I've held this (sort of subconscious) view for the longest time, even today I can't seem to shake it off completely, when I catch a glimpse of 1080i OTA HDTV on a small-ish display at an electronics store or whatever I still find myself coming to grips with the fact that that ain't computer video, that's television.
So even though I don't see myself getting an LCD TV any time soon, I started to realize that this present time of everyone having basically giant hi-res computer displays in their living rooms is actually kind of cool and opens up new possibilities, for example socially enjoying old PC/Mac games that were once stuck to a small screen, but of course as soon as I realize this, I also realize that VGA inputs have pretty much disappeared from LCD TVs manufactured in the past few years! And it doesn't seem to be a "we're ditching analog" thing, because they still come with component/composite video inputs, so I don't see the point of exclusively removing VGA from new TVs while keeping other, less convenient, arguably worse analog inputs. If I put my conspiracy hat on I'd say that they don't want us hooking up computers through an "unprotected" video path anymore. 🙄
One of the most common questions I get from non-tech savvy folk is how to convert VGA to HDMI, precisely because new TVs are lacking VGA inputs but people still have perfectly good devices that only do VGA - and unfortunately there's no shortage of unscrupulous retailers selling them completely useless (and possibly dangerous) passive HDMI to VGA/component/composite cables. 😠