I just got a TV-Out cable for my gp2x. I was really surprised by the VERY bad display it puts on the TV screen. Everything is pixelized with rough edges. Movies look ugly. Is this normal? What can I do to improve the output?

The TV-Out cable just doubles the pixels to make it output to the full size of your TV. The menu will be a bit blocky, but it's not that bad.

However, the video player will play the video in its full resolution (if it's a 640x480 video, it'll play in 640x480--meaning it should be clear). Are you sure your video isn't a small resolution to start with?

320x240 is always gonna look rough on a big screen these days.

I have a similar problem.
PAL output gives a colour image, but it looks as if it's got interference.
NTSC output gives a perfectly sharp image, in black and white.

I wondered if this was due to it being an old tv-out cable? (I believe there's a newer type?)

Ta.

Depends on where you use the TV Out cable.
Looks fine on my CRT TV, but looks ugly and blocky on a Plasma Screen...

Pal is ugly on my TV, but NTSC is ok, as long as your TV can display NTSC colors...

I use it on 34" CRT TV with cable extension and composite gender.

I tried PAL and NTCS and both look bad

I had same problem with conversion cable S-video to SCART:
- on PAL there was a color image with interference
- on NTSC there was a clean B&W image

than I looked into setup menu (on TV) and find changeable option "S-video ON/OFF" so I turn this option to ON and there was a nice clean color image on PAL mode

Do you mean your TV has s-video but you connected it to SCART? My TV has composite and component imputs only

So I guess some scart inputs are s-video and some are not?

The GP2X only sets PAL and NTSC movie modes (720x576 or 720x480), so movies should look fine (never tried myself though). Everything else will look like shit. PAL will scale games up to 360x288 and NTSC will look slightly better but still scaled to 360x240 (never at any point does it do nice doubled scaling). The GPH driver for the tv chip does include code for an NTSC game mode (320x240 with correct overscan so you don't loose the edges of the screen) but it doesn't work for some reason. Myself and Rlyeh have spent a little time trying to get a true 320x240 working, but no luck so far (it should be possible though - the chip fully supports both PAL and NTSC game modes).

Another thing I was wondering about... why doesn't the GP2X anti-alias photos when they are scaled in the photo viewer, images just look too bloody blocky.

I've messed about in PAL and NTSC modes and it all looks pretty blurred and yukky Will probably sell my TV out on Ebay whenever I get a chance.

Hopefully the BOB TV output will be better (?)

no my TV has only SCART - I use conversion cable from S-video output (gp2x tv-out cable) to SCART input



maybe some TVs can emulate(?) S-video on SCART connector I think... I was suprised with this "S-video ON/OFF" option in TV menu so I try it and image is good now

On all of my NTSC televisions (CRT/projection), some lines don't show up. Is this due to the fact that NTSC doesn't have as many scanlines as PAL? It doesn't seem to scale up at all...

On the earlier Firmware I had trouble with full resolution videos playing jerkily on my TV. The firmware upgrade fixed this, but now, I see this blocky effect which wasn't there before. I am on FW 2.1.1

Could you tell me where you got that cable please? And how long is it?

THIS is one of the things that most annoys me about the GP2X!

Lots of times I wanted to show some photos to friends/relatives but the image quality on the TV out is embarrassing so I just show them on the little GP2x screen.
It's a real shame because I'm sure it couldn't be that hard to fix: it's just an extension on the same principle as what the video player does when it scales a 720x576 AVI for example. Maybe in FW 3.1?

The reason why this is the case is quite simple: GPH just don't understand how their hardware works. They didn't write the video player either.

Here's the gp2x on a 35" CRT via s-video and it looks ok. i agree that it would look awful on a plasma/lcd.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRaL9-BrzUg

Bad GPH

GP2X is an open system, so, can a coder write a better viewer?