VGA to Composite or S-Video
 

It now appears that all of the new laptops hitting the streets have only a VGA or HDMI port for video. There are quite a few adapters/converters on the market, but I am reluctant to spend $50 or so without more information.

Does anyone have any knowledge of an inexpensive fix to get around the lack of S-video outputs?

Thanks,

DC

you can go to www.svideo.com and they have all kinds of adapters,and they are reasonable and i also i have 2 adapters that i bought from anther site.i just can't remember the site ( search the forum ) i paid $26.00 and it has vga to s-video and composite

Thanks, Billy...

I purchased my 7-pin S-video->composite RCA adapter from the Svideo source & have been happy with the results.

The question regarding the VGA converters is, are you happy with them? We have a 100' run (75' snake, splitter and 25' to 2 TV's), and any significant line loss would not be acceptable.

Thanks for your input,

DC

i never had to use the vga converter since most of the places i played before only had an s-video input,and the venue's tv is about 10' infront of me, but since i got this new gig, i had to bring in a monitor and the venue's tv is behind me,running 2 52" lcd tv, so far i havent had any problems with it, regarding the use of snake, i have a 50' snake, that i use when doing big venues, but i havent seen a snake with video input in it, so i cant' answer that, from what i heard the longer the cable you'll lose some .

Video converters
 

Billy;

I am using one of the mic chanels to feed the video. The mic wires runing through most snakes are twisted and shielded and have an impedence close to that of a single strand shielded cable. I bought two XLR adapters with female RCA on each of them, one female XLR for the mixer end and one male XLR for the stage box end. Hosa GXF-132 and GXR-133 are available from most reputable dealers or on line.

DC

Seawolf, if your signal loss is too much then you can always use one of those Radio Shack RF amps at the end of the snake and then split it from there. That would boost the signal back up.

Why do you need to convert to S-Video? The monitors, projectors and TVs I use all have VGA inputs so I use a VGA splitter/amplifier with a 75' cable and two 25' runs and no signal loss.

Well simple answer for this one. Some like myself for instance don't carry:

And of course you can only come out of most laptops with either an SVideo, or VGA, but not both at the same time. Now, my singers monitor i can use either composite, VGA, or SVideo, not a problem.However.....the club has 3 televisions, two have S video's, and one is so old it only has the 75 ohm coax cable screw on hookup. So............ I have to convert my video 3 ways. It's a pain, we're gonna miss the Svideo on the new laptops, like we are starting to miss the 32 bit already.:e