Dear Christoph,

thanks for your answer and saving me from trouble. I moved your answer inline.

Am Mittwoch, den 25.02.2009, 13:25 +0100 schrieb C.Scheeder:

Paul Menzel schrieb:

...

Dear readers,

I am planning to set up a low budget VDR using the VGA2SCART patches [1]. Therefore I need a VGA2SCART cable. The distance between the VDR and the CRT TV will be probably 5 meters.

There are some howtos on the WWW on how to build a cable yourself [2]. But I am not experienced in soldering, so I have the following questions.

1. Are VGA2SCART cables you can buy also suitable and do you have

experiences what manufactures produce good quality cables?

Searching the WWW I found the following offers but no comparison or review about the quality.

http://www.amazon.de/s/?ie=UTF8&keywords=vga+scart+kabel&tag=googhyd... http://www.kauflux.de/?id=FROOGLE&_artnr=8429706 http://shop.strato.de/epages/61223614.sf/?ObjectPath=/Shops/61223614/Product... http://www.google.de/products?hl=de&q=vga+scart+kabel&um=1&ie=UT... http://www.supernature-forum.de/allgemeine-computerfragen/63171-grafik-gibt-... http://forum.fachinformatiker.de/hardware/122150-vga-scart-kabel-tv.html

inakustik claims to have high quality cables.

http://www.in-akustik.com/de/KABEL/Home-Video/VGA-Scartkabel.htm

as far as i read, all these are kabels to connect a scart-OUTPUT to an VGA-INPUT. (scart-out of receiver to vga-in of a beamer/lcd-tv) These cables are useless for connecting a VGA-card to a monitor, as they do not handle the vga-sync-singals correct. If you use them, you probably won't get a picture and perhaps will fry your tv and/or vga-card.....

Does anyone know of a shop (in Europe, better Germany) selling the correct cables?

...

2. Are there any disadvantages in buying these cables?

a) I would guess, that most of the cables do not have plugs for audio next to the VGA plug, so that I will need to either use an amplifier or have to modify the cable and solder some wires to the SCART-plug.

...

¹ With around 10 € for a 5 meter cable they do not seem to be that much expensive.

[1] http://www.linuxtv.org/pipermail/vdr/2008-July/017347.html [2] http://www.vdr-portal.de/board/thread.php?postid=742945#post742945

Thanks,

Paul

On Wed, Feb 25, 2009 at 02:51:05PM +0000, Tony Houghton wrote:

I'm not sure whether C Scheeder is right, but it seems highly likely.

Christoph is right. The buyable cables operate the wrong direction for our purposes.

Different cards need diffeernt types of cable. For example ATI and Matrox cards can both output the necessary composite sync, but they need slightly diffeernt wiring. Most other cards can't output composite sync so you need a circuit to combine them.

with my cable described here:

http://www.vdr-portal.de/board/thread.php?postid=742945#post742945

you have a multi purpose solution because it does not take into account special features of some special graphics cards.

I never understood why people rely on things like on-chip composite sync. You easily can do that externally by two Rs and one T.

I successfully use the VGA2SCART cable above for nVidia, ATI Radeon and Intel graphics. Of course driver initializes separate sync for all three.

If you do go ahead and build a cable I'd recommend cutting one end off an existing VGA cable and using a multimeter to work out which wire is

that's how I do that. But take care to grab a cable with VGA Pin 9 wired. There are many cables out there with this pin not being connected.

Cheers Thomas