Hi

I have an old PC monitor and was wondering if there wasa way of feeding TV through it. Obviously you couldn't use it as a true TV - I'm more interested in basically feeding whatever channel I'm watching through the monitor. ie - If I change the channel on my TV, it also changes on the monitor.

Sound is not necessary but woud be nice.

Anyone know of a cable to buy/make?

Ta

Chris

i think it would need to be more of a box (ie an converter) their was some around a few years ago, i havn't kept up but i think miliga use to produce one.

neil

I bought a box on ebay a year or so ago that goes in between your computer and your monitor. You plug your computers VGA output into it which is passed through another port on the box to the VGA monitor. The box has a built in analogue tv tuner + some lame games. You don't even need the computer on for it to work plus when the computer is on it is just a click of a button to switch between tv and computer on the screen. You can just connect an aerial to receive tv or do as I do and connect a foxtel box to it. Audio can be played through in built speaker or passed through to computers sound set up. It even has AV output to connect a video recorder if you wanted to (handy if you ever wanted to record either your computer screen or tv/foxtel content). From memory I payed about $140 but I can't be sure. I'll add details on this product to this post tomorrow in case your interested.

I also use another solution to achieve a slightly different result but this requires a computer so it's not really what you asked about but may still be of interest. I bought a Dazzle Hollywood Bridge (Analogue to Digital AV converter) a few years ago (now days there should be other, better boxes available from numerous companies) to copy my old VHS tapes to my computer for editing and burning to DVD in Final Cut Pro. I have tried connecting the tv to the dazzle and then via firewire to my computer which allows me to monitor & record tv content like a PVR device.

According to an article I read on the O'Reilly Developers site you can download HackTVCarbon from Apple's Developer site for free and use it instead with this type of set up to play the tv's signal on your Mac in a resizable window along with audio rather than use Final Cut Pro or iMovie (which also works). With this setup you can also download another small app from Apple's Developer site called SimpleVideoOut which allows you to send your computer screen to say a video recorder. In effect the opposite of what HackTVCarbon does.

Finally I have also seen devices (occasionally on ebay) such as the one made by Black Box that modulates a computers signal for viewing on TV's (trade show displays, presentations etc) plus special media conversion boxes to convert standard AV signals to VGA output. They have a catalogue with numerous solutions however they are not cheap.