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I just bought a new television. The problem is it turns out it doesn't have a VGA port. It does have: S-video, component, HDMI and SCART.

My Lenovo T60P only has VGA. I have searched frantically for a solution and even though it seems I have so many options they are all dead ends. Or I keep ending up having to buy a 100 euro box to convert the signal.

However, I found that some video cards support S-video through the VGA port. It says look it up in your video card's documentation. I have a Lenovo T60P laptop with an ATI MOBILITY FireGl v5250, but I can't seem to get my hands on any documentation where this is supposed to be documented.

I found this website:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=179529&highlight=s-video

There this guy says he thinks it is in the t60, but it is dropped in the t61. However, he suggests to the guy with the t60 that it won't work. I can't really conclude anything from that.

Furthermore, I am not looking for the best of the best quality. So then I found this:

http://www.amazon.com/VideoSecu-Computor-Presentation-Converter-VGA2TV/dp/B000X3FAJU/ref=pd_cp_e_3_img

I would be quite happy with this except that I don't think I can order it because I don't live in the US.

Can anybody give me a definite answer, as to whether the VGA port of my Lenovo T60P ATI FireGL v5250 supports S-video? I can then just buy a VGA to S-video adapter cable to achieve my goal.

Update

I ended up ordering a VGA to S-video converter box from eBay for about 15 euros (it's from China, so we'll see what I end up getting).

vga-dvi-hdmi
The reason I do not choose to use a VGA-VDI-HDMI solution is that it doesn't work. This thread shows a picture of all the possible connectors:

http://forums.afterdawn.com/thread_view.cfm/615836

The basic idea is, VGA = analog, DVI = analog or digital and HDMI = digital. So the DVI plug has some pins for analog and some for digital signals. If using a simple adapter to go from VGA-DVI-HDMI, the analog signal will be lost in the DVI-HDMI adapter. Simply because the HDMI cable doesn't do anything with the analog DVI pins.

At least, that's as far as I understand it.

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2 Answers 2

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According to this and this it looks like you're out of luck. They recommend going with the dock (big and bulky) or a vga-to-svideo converter as you mentioned in your post.

Edit: I'd like to add that there are a lot of VGA-to-HDMI solutions which should solve your problem. If your T60P shipped with a VGA-DVI adapter, you should be able to buy a DVI-HDMI cable fairly cheap and then connect VGA-DVI-HDMI.

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  • Thanks for the answer. I found the first link as well, but there they talk about systems with an explicit s-video out port. I was hoping my vga port would support s-video, allowing me to just connect an adapter cable. But the second link seems to confirm that t60 doesn’t have it. About the VGA-VDI-HDMI, I found that this is also not possible due to incompatible signals. I will post the info I found on this in my question when I get home tonight. It has to do with VDI supporting different signals, but not converting them.
    – Matthijs Wessels
    Apr 23, 2010 at 10:58
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I know this is old news, but svideo will be a completely unacceptable quality solution in any regard. you absolutely can convert a 15 pin vga connector to component connections and get full analog hd.

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    The converter I ordered didn't work. I ended up getting a cheap android tablet + docking station that could play 720p on my TV through HDMI. Now I have another laptop with Display Port ++ for which I bought a simple cable Display Port to HDMI. Works perfectly. However, about the quality: I'm not really bothered by the quality that much. Ten minutes into the movie and my brain has auto-scaled the size and filtered out the noise :).
    – Matthijs Wessels
    Sep 8, 2011 at 15:17

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