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Help needed to connect to the video-in connector in my car

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  • 30-05-2005 1:49am
    #1
    unkel
    Registered Users Posts: 65,400 ✭✭✭✭
    Chauffe, Marcel, chauffe!


    I want to connect a laptop to the 5.4 inch colour LCD in my car. It's a late '96 BMW 735iA that has TV+teletext and the video-in connector is in the back seat console

    I would like to connect my Pentium 4 laptop to this. The laptop has TV-out (S-video) and I have been able to get it to output onto the LCD but it's not great. The laptop does not have a screen connected to it, so I would prefer to use the 15 pin VGA connector rather than the tv-out. That way the laptop would output directly instead of me having to blindly hit a key-combination on the keyboard to switch to tv-out

    Anybody offer advice on how to do this?

    The tv only works when the car is stationery but I managed to hack it so it works now when the car is on the move :)

    Reason for asking: I'd like to get satnav going but on a tight budget here :cool:


Comments

  • Options
    #2
    jayok
    Registered Users Posts: 1,906 ✭✭✭jayok


    Hi Unkel,

    You're into the murky world of video signal standards here.

    The problem with the VGA signal on the laptop is that each colour signal R G and B is delivered separately (amongst other things) whereas the video-in on the LCD I would imagine is a composite in video signal (i.e. RGB are all combined on the one line) or something else. So to connect the VGA port to the LCD you would need to purchase (or build) a convertor. You can see some about a box here, but they are gonna cost about €100.

    http://www.trianglecables.com/cotovicovgad.html

    Besides that I would focus on the S-video out (s-video is much better than composite). The fact you are getting some sort of video output from the laptop would indicate that this may be you best approach. If you are seeing something, but it's not great, it's possible that the encoding of the s-video signal is incorrectly set. With s-video you can encode the signal with y/c luminance / chromance, errrr, I'll actually stop there or I could keep going forever... Basically there's two ways to encode the s-video signal and it's possible that you've simply selected the wrong encoding for the LCD that's connected. I don't know if you can switch the encoding on the laptop or on the LCD itself but you'll want to try switching one or the other.

    Actually the more I think about this the more I am thinking that the video-in on the LCD is probably just pure composite. I know some laptops (I'm thinking Dell here) actually come with a (cable) convertor that will change the video-out port on the laptop to a RCA style composite video connector. This would be your best bet. Furthermore, in the (Dell) laptops BIOS you can change the video output default mode to activiate the port to save you that blind Fn + F6 keypresses! :)

    Hope this helps...


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