[zymosis]

Dear,

I have used for many years the Xbox with XBMC as a media center at home. the Image was crisp clear for my 100-Hz 4:3 Tv.

now, my xbox died on me and I have bought the mini-dvi to s-video connector to connect my 2 months old macbook to my tv. Only, i am not happy about the image quality. Does anybody has tips?

is there a HDMI or VGA -Scart convertor anywhere so the signals are better shielded during transport than on S-video? I am really desperate otherwise I have to get my hands on a new old xbox.

Setup: TV - Scart output - scart->svideo convertor - high quality svideo cable - apple's svideo->mini DVI connector - Macbook

i don't have any digital inputs on my tv and I'm not planning to buy a new tv because of this.

I truly hope someone could point me out in the good direction.

regards

Zymosis

[spiderlane]

Can you elaborate more on what you're not happy about regarding image quality?

Also what Display Preference settings are you using on the MacBook? There may be some tweaking which can be done here to get a good picture.

[Gamester17]

IMHO a Mac is overkill for standard-definition TV so if you do not have a high-definition TV buy a used Xbox

[phunkysai]

I have an old standard def 4:3 TV, and I just recently bought the Mac Mini so that I could run XBMC. I got the mini so that in the future when I can afford an HDTV, I'll just switch the res on my mac mini and be ready to go.

Currently I'm using Apple's $20 DVI-to-S-Video cable, and my picture looks pretty good (at least as good as I had with my old dvd player anyway).

I've got my Mini display prefs at 640x480 "stretched", and I did go through the Color wizard which was great for getting my brightness and contrast perfected.

As the previous person said, what are you experiencing that you don't like?

[zymosis]

I will play with my settings to see if it is better now.

I just want to spend as little as mony as possible for the moment. I had the mac already and in a few years time I maybe will buy a new TV.... but not now or I won't enjoy my ripped movies anymore And I will feel obliged to buy HD content (what the real intent is of the HD format)

i want to stress out that i am not talking about macroblocking etc.... these are mpeg artefacts and as I work in the DVB world, i know what it is. The thing that I do not like at this moment is that the Icons, text, subs etc are not crisp clear on my screen, previously with my xbox, I did not notice this. this is now all a bit blurry. And this is the thing I don't like

I will play a bit with the settings and lett you know of the result.

regards

Jp

[iordonez]

Don't bother encoding your DVD rips, just use something like Mac the Ripper to dump the DVD to a Folder called "DVDs". Make this folder a source in XBMC, add a scraper for IMDB to it and enter library mode. This will save you hours in converting files.

Basically Netflix + MTR + XBMC = Huge library

If you are worried about space a new 500GB HDD is less than $100 these days.

Also go get a new TV. Even DVD rips look better on a mini -> HDTV.