Excuse me venting my spleen here but I had to share the experiences I`ve had over the past couple of days:
I admit it - my homecinema setup is crap. I have a 5 year old 14" portable telly, a 3 year old plays-ok-but-doesn`t-record-anymore VCR and, well thats about it. I do however have a reasonably high spec PC with a DVD player. For the past year I have suffered watching my movies on my PC and accompanying 17" monitor - hardly ideal.
I finally capitulated last weekend and splashed out on a `proper` TV and DVD player, (a 28" Loewe Xelos from http://www.empiredirect.co.uk and a Pioneer DV-626D from http://www.techtronics.com/). The TV arrived on Wednesday, so being the impatient git that I am I had to try and get the PC to play my movies on the big screen.
My PC runs Windows 98 and I have a Creative Labs 3D Blaster, which is an NVIDIA TNT-2 Ultra based graphics card. I picked up an S-VHS lead and slapped it in between the PC and TV, picked the channel and... nothing. A quick download to grab Creatives graphics driver, (I had NVIDIAS reference driver installed), a reboot, and I tried again... and nothing. I resorted to reading the help, (what a wuss eh?), and was presented with screenshots and diagrams explaining exactly what buttons to press to bring up the `TV Out` options page... unfortunately said buttons weren`t present. Apparently the driver I had installed and the help file I was reading didn`t match (thank you Creative!).
A quick web search showed other people were having similar problems and had found the individual registry key entries that needed tweaking in order to enable TV Out. One registry backup, twenty odd minutes of hacking the registry and two reboots and I was ready to try again... and... it worked! I could see my PC desktop (albeit in a rather feeble 800x600 resolution), on my TV. Home and dry, I`ll just slap a movie on, kick back relax and enjoy... or so I thought.
You see this is where the dreaded MacroVision kicked in. Apparently I was attempting to output an un-encoded signal that could have been recorded onto video, which isn`t allowed. Instead I got a big yellow "YOU CAN`T WATCH THIS" screen.
Back to the drawing board, or the search engines to be precise. A quick search for "TNT2 TV out macrovision disable" returned an interesting sounding result:
"Q: I`ve got a TNT2 Ultra with s-video out - when I try to play a DVD through my TV the player`s window only contains the words "Macrovision 1, Macrovision 2, Macrovision 3" (playing on my monitor works fine).
A: This can be fixed with TVTool from http://come.to/tvout ..."
It sounds like just what I want. So I pop across to its homepage - and its in German. Thankfully `Download` seems to mean the same in German as it does in English so a quick download, unzip, install and reboot later, I`m ready to try again. I fire up TVTool select what look like being the right options, (including ticking the `Disable Macrovision` box), and give it a go. Lo and behold - DVD movies playing from my PC on my TV! Woo-hoo! Its gone two in the morning now so I crawl into bed content in the knowledge I can watch my movies in full on 28" widescreen loveliness.
Of course the next day my Pioneer DVD player arrived so I will probably never use my new-found PC DVD playing capabilites again... still, its nice to know that I can :-)
