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Will the screen-spanning hack allow for the second display to be a TV?

J

Jalexster

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jun 8, 2004
668
0
Seeing as I don't have a second monitor that I can use with my iBook, I was wondering if I could attach the TV that I have in my room, up to my iBook, and say, runa DVD on that, from my iBook, while I do other stuff.

In other words: Can I use a TV as a second monitor, with the composite/S-Video adaptor, and the monitor-spanning hack?
 
You know, I was kinda wondering this myself. I have an old 13" TV in my closet. (So old it has two knobs--one for VHF and one for UHF) and I was gonna get a RF modulator for it and use it simply to display my Marine Aquarium on...

Well, now a friend has given me a loaner monitor so I ordered the VGA adapter instead, but it'd still be nice to know.

...now only if I could get my hands on a VGA switch so I could switch the 2nd monitor between my Dreamcast and being a 2nd display for the Mac...hmm.
 
---Uninformed Opinion---

I would guess you could, but I'm not sure if you'd want to. TVs generally have quite bad resolution. Depending on what you're doing with the second monitor though, it might not matter.
 
Don't bother. The resolution will be so bad you might be able to watch an old VHS movie, but that is about it.

My PowerBook-1024x768 resolution. TV: 640x400 ish, I can't remember the exact but it is near that....I think....
 
I've installed the hack and I can confirm that this works. It's handy for watching movies, because you can keep the controls on the iBook screen. I wouldn't want to do much else with it though!
 
Said TV is quite old (No RCA connectors), but it has full NTSC support (Why I don't know), and for some reason can show a widescren signal, with black bars, even if you origional picture is native widescreen without the bars.

Anyway, I have hooked my iBook up to it in the past for watching DVDs, and it is fine (because the DVDs are MADE to show on a TV), so I thought I could watch a DVD on it full screen, while doing other stuff (like browsing the web), on my iBook.

It's quite a large TV, and would be perfect for this purpose. Although I do have to ask, is there any way of diverting ALL my VRAM to the iBook's screen, because the TV won't really need VRAM for watching a DVD, right? Well it shouldn't.
 
well your book will need the vram to push the signal through to the tv, but thats about all that i can think of it needing the vram for
 
It will split the 32 megs. You'll need some VRAM to display anything, even DVDs. It should work fine. I've done it with a PowerBook (and a Beige G3) with video cards worse than the current one in the iBooks, and it works fine. I still do it on my PC. Little slow for some things, and I sometimes get pixellation or ghosting, but it does work. DVD plus Safari should work ok. The hack just enables in software what is there in already in hardware.
 
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