K
Ken Fox
David Shorthouse said:
Dave,
I didn't know you lived in Edmonton, just in Western Canada. Haven't been
to Alberta in quite a while but I used to go to Jasper National Park plus
the others with some frequency before I moved to the Idaho Rockies and hence
had no need of anyone else's Rocky Mountains
Anyway, I do have one of those VGA to S-Video and Composite doohickies I
gave you the link to (I actually bought two of them last month as part of a
larger order with Cyberguys and have taken neither of them out of the
plastic bags. They are ridiculously mislabelled as, "Audio Cable,
HD15M-MD4F/RCAF,1FT, Ivory, Made in China." It most obviously has a VGA
male end connected with maybe 8" of cords (1 for S-Video and 1 for
composite) to a female composite and a female S-Video. The quality of the
plugs and cabling looks decent. I don't see any reason why this would not
work, although I can't guess what the picture quality would be. Being as
VGA has potentially hugely greater resolution than does composite (or
presumably even S-Video), my guess is that the picture quality would be as
good as you can get from a computer going to a TV, which is to say ok as
long as you don't get up too close to the TV. If you look at that Asus PCI
thingie you wanted to buy, it really doesn't appear to have much on it, so
my guess is that complicated circuitry is not required.
Presumably you would have to set your output frequency and resolution to
something a TV can handle; if you set it wrong, I don't know what would
happen, but hopefully we wouldn't be reading about your little accident in
the newspaper
Anyway, this thing cost me $2, I think, and the shipping to me was not a
lot. I could put it in a padded envelope (I have some, that cost me about
50 cents US each). The USPS website quotes an airmail cost of about $2 for
airmail of a 6 oz. padded envelope to Canada.
If you want to try this thing, I'd send it to you for my expenses involved,
e.g., $5 US including the shipping cost to me originally and the padded
envelope. Hopefully this solution would work and it would be cheap enough
that if it doesn't work you could just toss it without feeling like you were
out much.
Let me know at (e-mail address removed) and we can work out
the details. You can ask your Francophone friends to deciper my email
address . . . . .
Best,
ken
p.s. if you were really insistent about that Asus part we could also work
out something, e.g. you could buy it directly from Newegg and have it
shipped to me, then I could ship it to you for my cost of postage; I'd
rather not buy it myself but you could have Newegg send it to me as a
"gift." My concern is that this item is more fragile than the cabling I
have, will require more packaging, and will cost a lot more to send to you
than this cable converter. I'd also guess that the results will be the
same -- e.g. adequate. I could label either as a "gift" and hopefully they
would not charge you any duty or GST on such a cheap item.