[Novalug] display video *input* on thinkpad t20?

[Maxwell Spangler]

Have you considered going on Ebay to look for a used DVD player for the
CD bay on your T20?

When the CDRW drive on my four year old HP laptop died, I found abundant
sources of replacement parts on ebay.  Installation was an easy 5 minute
process and it works just as good as the original.  An option, for an
extra $30-40 was a DVD writer instead of the DVD player I added.

If you can do this for the T20 it'll be much simpler and easier to work
with. 

I don't think you'll find any laptop with an SVIDEO port that does
anything besides output.  Laptops just aren't expected to do this so the
money isn't put into the laptop to support it.

You can add an external box that will capture analog video, convert it
to MPEG2 video and pass it to the computer but this seems like an
inelegant and problematic way of doing things.

hth.

On Sun, 2008-04-20 at 16:58 -0400, Dave Aronson wrote:
> Dear NoVaLUG:
> 
> My wife has a Thinkpad T20, running Linux (sorry, dunno what distro or 
> version), with no DVD player.  She would like to use it as a screen for 
> a separate DVD player.  It does have an S-video port, and some of the 
> stuff I've seen implies that it can be used as an input.  Any clues how 
> one would do this under Linux, on a lappy?
> 
> I tried googling 'linux "video input"' (sans single-quotes), but didn't 
> come up with anything that looked to me to be helpful.  (This may be 
> partly because I know next to nothing about video capture, editing, and 
> so on!  I have never tried building a MythTV box or BeVo, and don't even 
> have a TiVo.)
> 
> One page mentioned an app called "Monitor Mode"... for the Mac.  Is 
> there some equivalent for Linux?  I googled 'linux "monitor mode"' but 
> all the hits seem to be about monitoring network traffic, or calculating 
> the base mode for one's monitor, or the mode of using multiple monitors, 
> not using a system's display as a monitor for an external video source.
> 
> Thanks,
> Dave
>