VGA or S-Video for secondary output

[Sam]

In one bedroom, there is a Dell desktop with a video card with DVI-D out (currently the primary monitor) but it also has a VGA and S-Video output, neither of which are currently used.

If I want to feed Sage signals to a nearby 32" LCD TV, would I get a better picture setting up the VGA as a secondary monitor, or using the S-Video output if the source was SD based recordings? What about better quality sources such as DVDs? Does the S-video on cards like this just mimic the primary monitor output? Or only multimedia output? Is pc output usable via S-video?

Would I be better off moving the DVI-D to feed the LCD TV and use the VGA to feed the desktop monitor? Install a second video card with DVI-D out?

[malore]

I believe that VGA is roughly equivalent to component video, so much better than S-video that can't output above interlaced standard definition. DVI-D has the advantage of removing the digital to analog and back to digital conversion, but I'm using VGA for my LCD monitor and it looks great. If easily done, I'd try both combinations of DVI and VGA and see which gives the best results for both screens.

Usually you can have the TV/second monitor either be a copy of the primary monitor or treated as a separate second monitor. Making it a second monitor has the advantage of being able to watch TV on one monitor and do something else on the other, and you can run each at a different resolution. The disadvantage is that 3D acceleration and hardware mpeg acceleration usually only work on the primary monitor. If you set the TV as the primary monitor, then lots of dialog box and programs will appear on the TV and not on the computer monitor. I think you can also get full screen video to appear on both screens even when they are treated as separate screens. So lots of possibilities.

You will probably get the best picture on you LCD TV if you can run screen resolution that matches you screens native pixel resolution if your TV supports that input. So your computer will act like a upscaling DVD player when watching DVDs. Once again, you should experiment to find out what works best, make sure you read your TV's manual, so you only use supported resolutions.