Hi, I'm new.

My boss has asked me to set up a DVD server for him. He's got a fancy Runco DHD Vivix II processor and VX1000d projector.

The DHD has a DVI w. HDCP input to which I've hooked up the DVI output of the ATI Radeon 9600 Pro on our G5.

We noticed the picture coming from Center Stage/VLC and Tiger DVD was washed out and a little blurry (compared to DVD going through AV receiver via component video). I was told by our Runco tech that it was because the Runco has a native resolution of 1280x720.

It seems the resolution of this DVI connection is being forced to 1024x768 but I don't know if it's a limitation of the projector or the graphics card or the operating system. Trying 800x600 worked but other resolutions blacked out the projector (and it said "No Signal").

I tried switchresx and after using the tutorial (from this site i think) I got a resolution that was supposedly 1280x720, and didn't black out the projector, but still registered at the Runco as 1024x768 (how it looked, what it said on the video processor, and what the switchresx reported from the DDC export)

I couldn't get a sensible answer out of Runco or ATI, so I hope someone here can help me.

I don't know if I'm doing something wrong or if I just need a better graphics card, or if this projector is no good for hooking computers up.

Any clues appreciated. I'm an audio guy and this stuff hurts my brain.

Thanks,

James

Hi James,

You're not doing anything wrong.
You don't need a better graphics card.
I believe the projector is no good for hooking up computers.

I have a Runco VX-2i with the integrated Vivix processor. I also have both an AppleTV and a dedicated Core-duo Intel Mac with DVI output for surfing and ripped-DVD viewing.

I've had similar experience and results. FInally I had my projector sent to Runco to have the firmware (or DDC?) patched to provide native 1280x720 resolution on one of the inputs. Runco worked hard to understand what I wanted but admitted that their projector wasn't designed, nor is intended, to be used as the output device for a computer.

That was the only way to get a full resolution computer desktop image on my projector.

Well, we decided to try one of our PCs with both a top of the line ATI video card and Nvidia card.

We were able to get the proper resolution, and then we used a plugin for our DVD player (ffdshow) to do scaling, because otherwise the DVD looked awful (although the desktop was beautiful).

Still there was a subtle lack of sharpness and clarity (relative to a DVD player 1/3 the price of the video card) and nothing I tried would fix it. There is a lot of info about ffdshow and AVIsynth and it seems that it's not a simple thing to get sharpness just right. Unfortuntately the processor in the PC didn't seem powerful enough to run all the algorthms available that might have helped.

I would have thought it would be easier than this. It may be that when the hardware DVD player is playing it's 480i and the Runco is doing all the heavy lifting, instead of the computer who doesn't do as good a job.

Or maybe the DVD player has some special magic inside it that I can't replicate on the computer.

One other theory is that the video processor is connected to the projector with analog cables, so the video processor is converting computer's DVI signal to analog, whereas it doesn't need to do this for the Hardware DVD which is connected analog. Except this would mean that the Runco is doing scaling in the analog realm?