Not sure what to do: Blocky TV OUT and Broken S-Video pin

[edgewater]

Alright dude, check it out. I use S-Video from my video card to my TV so that I can watch DVD's and xvid movies on my TV (my stand alone dvd player broke). The other night I unplugged the S-Video cable from my video card to check out the pins because I was reading up on the 4pin/7pin configurations for another problem.... anyways.... when I went to plug it back in it was from an awkward angle and it was kind of dark, and I ended up trying to force it in the wrong way and ultimately broke off Pin 2 (which according to wikipedia is Ground (C)).

Expecting the worse I plugged it in the right way, turned on the TV, and opened a movie and it played fine. So I am wondering what Pin 2 does if it can still play movies fine without it. Am I getting less quality? Less clarity? Any info on this would be helpful!

Also, lately I noticed (and I don't know if it is because of the broken Pin 2 or not) that in any movie I played, xvid or DVD, in dark areas the picture appears extremely blocky and artifacty. It's not THAT big of a deal, but it looks perfect on my monitor and I just want to reproduce that perfectly on my TV. I can't remember what it looked like before I broke Pin 2, I am pretty sure I would have noticed if it was blocky in dark images on DVD's though.

Extra info that might help, I broke Pin 2 after I formatted my computer. Before the format I used the K-Lite codec pack with DivX player or WinDVD. After the format I installed the defiler pack with ffdshow because I read good things about it and use zoomplayer or mplayer with windows GUI for movies and DVD's. <--- Could that cause the blockyness?

Anyways, I have a fast computer, well fast enough (3Ghz P4, WinXP Pro, 2GB DDR2, 80GB SATA, X800XL, X-Fi sound card, and a crappy 7 year old 17" CRT which is why I watch movies on my 27" TV

Thanks for any help, sorry for the length.

[toomanycats]

Get a new S-Video cable. They are cheap. The blockiness could be from the loss of the ground but you can't diagnose electronics until you have the basics covered. I had a blockiness after using the K-lite Codec pack and had to adjust the options under options/player/format to include certain filters (not a good enough memory to tell you which one but look in their and check off what you need, I checked all of them) that cleared up my problems.

[edgewater]

Well I got a new s-video cable and everything is the same as it was before. So I guess pin #2 on the cable is useless. Anyways, I still get blocky images in dark areas, and the brightness seems to be up far or something, because in some parts of movies I can see things on the TV that don't show up on my monitor because it's dark. And I don't think changing settings in CCC did anything.

[toomanycats]

I too have noticed artifacts in dark sections on certain TV's if the brightness is set too high. You might want to try one of those movies that have a THX optimizer built in to see if your contrast is too high. A balace between that contrast and brightness levels can really produce a great picture but can be hard to achieve without any standard. If the sub bright on a TV is too high you will see more artifacts. If the flyback is too high you will see scan lines.