TV out turned all of a sudden black and white,cant get color back

[zeltak]

Hi guys


After using a HTPC in the living room for the past 3 years, I decieded to add another client to my bedroom. For that i bought a new nvidia card and installed it in my living room HTPC, then took out the old nvidia gefroce3 deluxe card that served me well for the past 5 years. I then installed the gfroce card in my old PC (p4 1.5 Ghz, 384 MB RdRAM). After installing it (and all needed drivers) everything seemed to work perfectly yet suddenly out of the blue the TV Out screen started flickering and then i got a black and white output. I treid everything (configing the Nvidia drivers, restarting, changing tv out cables etc...) yet nothing works. After a few days the PC reboots in color again (also without me doing anything) and then after a hour or so starts flickering for a second and its black and white again , its strange since the card worked perfectly in my oliving room HTPC.... can anyone help?

thx alot in advance

Zeltak

[elite]

Unlikely but worth a try: Check your card in seated in the slot correctly and cables are firmly connected

[cosmocat]

How does the card connect to the TV, Composite or S-Video.
If its S-Video the colour and black-and-white signals are sent seperately down the cable. The flicker you describe sounds like a hardware failure, poor connection in the card socket going open circuit under thermal stress as the PC warms up. Moving the card from one machine to another may have caused the connection to crack. Check your cable and see if wiggleing the cable in the socket brings the colour back.

[cosmocat]

Oops forgot to add, if you have the facilities, try resoldering the card connector.

[tieke]

I have always had a problem with outputting PAL with my Nvidia card - it is a known complaint with unfortunately no known fix that works for me. Once it is working fine, I just try to avoid any touching any video settings. If it goes to black and white, unplugging the video cord from the back of the TV for a moment or two and then replugging it back in while the TV is going seems to fix it. I suspect that the NTSC autodectect cannot be properly turned off, and as it has been a while since I got it this stable, I can't remember any specific steps (which of course included a number or different drivers/patches/option/installation methods etc). In my opinion, Nvidia's PAL tv-out support is woefully below par in a certain percentage of cases, but I don't expect any immediate change.

cheers,

tieke

[rowle1jt]

My FX5200 Ultra did this a couple weeks ago... and for the life of me I couldn't fix it by tweaking and fiddling. So I just downloaded the latest Nvidia drivers, un-installed the old ones and installed the new ones. So far... I am still viewing in color...

Are you by chance using an ATI tuner card? I can't be positive, but I think my issue started with an upgrade from some of the ATI Multi Media Center software.

Thankfully, I am on a PVR150MCE capture card now.