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    E1505/E1705 YPrPb/SPDIF output on the cheap

    Discussion in 'Dell' started by krhainos, Aug 23, 2006.

  1. krhainos

    krhainos Notebook Enthusiast

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    Needless to say, I was blown away when I had called Dell Parts Sales and they had told me the Component Video adapter that goes in the S-Video port was $69.99. There was no way there was $60+ worth of parts in that dinky little thing. So, the research commenced and I had noticed the ATI S-Video to Component Video cable for $12.99 + shipping.

    I purchased that, thinking I got an awesome deal. I was partially right.

    The card detects a YPrPb/Component device! I had green, and red -- but no blue. :( Instead of blue signal, I saw fuzz. And when I muted the audio, the blue fuzz disappeared. It appears that Dell did a silly pin-switch from the original ATI pintout to justify the $50 markup! What should've been the blue pin was infact outputting SPDI/F. So thus began my quest for the blue pin.

    The way that the S-Video port can output many formats is that the card probes the port first to sense what device is plugged in. For the Component adapter to show up, certain pins are left open and certain pins are grounded out. Fortunately, the ATI adapter did most of the work and I was able to work off of that to figure out what combination was used to kick the card into outputting YPbPr. It appears that if the card senses both pin #4 and pin #7 grounded out, it'll kick over to S-Video. If it senses #4 and #7 being grounded out, it'll kick over to YPrPb as S-Video or RCA will never be using #5.

    So, what I ended up doing was pretty risky. I had a myriad of pins sticking out of the all pins in the S-Video port of my E1505, and a pile of aligator clips clipped to the Component-In on my parents' 42" Sony. And a probed each of the unused pins until I saw blue. My parents would slay me if they read that I used their HDTV to save $50 on an adapter :eek:

    To modify the $13 ATI adapter, I hacked the plastic rubber coating off with a lighter and a hacksaw, and very carefully melted away all the molded plastic, exposing the bare pins inside the connector. You could alternatively simply purchase a 7-pin mini-DIN connector from Digi-Key or Mouser. Connected the appropriate pins, and I had SPDI/F and Component out of my laptop in beautiful quality. Photos to come. Here's the diagram in the meantime.

    The Red, Green, and Blue connectors you see are the original ones that were a part of the ATI adapter. The White one with a Female-Female genderbender you see is the Blue signal. The connector that's colored Blue is actually SPDI/F.

    This adapter modified or not may actually work with other notebooks or even different video cards. Go forth and experiment!

    [​IMG]
    [​IMG]
    The two columns diffrentiate between the pinouts that the ATI came with unmodified (labelled "ATI"), versus the pin swap that made it work with the Dell (labelled "Dell").
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Feb 6, 2015
    krhainos, Aug 23, 2006
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  2. mini

    mini Notebook Consultant

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    mini, Aug 23, 2006
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