Big TV-OUT problem...

[Parabellum]

Hi,

I have a 3D Prophet III for about one month now and I have not been able to get the TV-OUT working so far. Let me explain...

I have an Iwill KK266-R (KT133A) motherboard and Windows 2000 installed (service pack 2). I was anxious to see my favorite DVD on my TV via my video card. So I went to a local shop to get all the cables needed :

1st - S-VHS male to male (RCA home theater)
2nd - S-VHS female to RCA female adapter (Radio Shack)
3rd - RCA male to RCA male (RCA Home theater)

I plugged all the cable correctly (in the video input of my VCR). I check the option "enable TV-OUT" under the "device selection" tab of the Hercules 21.81 drivers. I then select NTSC-M mode, and set the country to Canada. Finally I select the "RCA" output. Then I push the button "input select" on my remote. Now, the TV scrambles, the monitor goes blank and THEN, the TV gives me a blue screen and my monitor flips back to Windows 2000 leaving the TV-OUT option unselected (but select the monitor as output).

I have read other problems on hercules's forum and someone talked about to raise the VIO voltage required by the video card. The Iwill KK266-R comes with 3.4V at default (instead of 3.3V on other boards). I have not tried this option for one reason :

My brother also have a 3D Prophet III but has an Abit BE6-II and Win98SE installed but has NO PROBLEM AT ALL. His TV-OUT is working as it is intended to work with none of the problem described above. I have told my brother to lower down his VIO voltage to 3.3V and his TV-OUT worked just fine despite a drop of 0.2V (the Abit BE6-II has 3.5V at default with latest BIOS). Well it seems not to be the cause of the problem.

A friend of mine also has a 3D Prophet III (we're fan, he) and also has Win2000 (service pack 2) installed and gets the same problem as me. His motherboard in this case is an Abit KA7 (Slot A Athlon) (VIO at 3.3V).

I have tried what Hercules described as a solution... Unplug the monitor and boot with the TV-OUT. Well, surprisingly, this setup is working but, humm, i'm stuck at 640 X 480 in 16 colors. This is not what I call a "good" option to watch DVD. Watching DVD with a such mediocre setup is, well, making the TV-OUT feature useless. I'm better watching DVD on my monitor with all the "bell & whistles" while beeing "stuck" with a 19in. monitor (Sony CPD-G400). At least, I know that my cables are not defective (80$CAN, ouch).

There are two possible explanation of this weird problem :

1st - I have discovered that Windows 2000 gets all my expansion card on the same IRQ
3D Prophet III + Netgear FA310TX NIC + Aureal Vortex 2 all on IRQ 11. So far, I have not figured out a way to separate them. All my card are in unshared PCI slots of my motherboard.

2nd - Windows 2000 dislikes the TV-OUT. Only my brother with Win98SE was able to make his TV-OUT function properly. Maybe this is an issue with nvidia's drivers. I don't even consider one second turn back to Win98SE, so this is not an option as I prefer the stability of Win2000 to enable TV-OUT.

I don't know if anybody had this exact same problem but I would delighted if someone can share his experience, if the problem was solved in a way or another.

Thanks for reading this long post,

Parabellum

[DAppel]

Well, it really doesn't seem to be a VIO problem.

I've had a similar problem some time ago. My problem was that Windoze was trying to set a resolution too high for my decoder chip. Manually setting it solved all.
I have no experience with Win2k so, sorry, I can't help you with that. But it doesn't look like a driver problem. My bet is that Windoze is trying to set something automatically ( it's a very "user friendly" OS...) and doesn't realize something is going wrong.

Go on trying to figure it out. Sometimes messing around with the system can solve the problem on a most unexpected way.

Good luck.

[Oni]

drop your resolution. Your VC is probably running @ about 1024x768 right? Drop it to 800*600.