I am buying my self a mini-itx system to act as my new desktop (I dont want power, I am more concerned about size). The system has a Via M2-12000 board featuring a s-video out connection.

Due to limitation in space I do not have room for a monitor, so I will be connecting the machine to my Television. My television is an LG 20" LCD flatpanel, which I bought this year. The television has both a s-video and scart connection. Te tv supports both 50hz and 60hz refresh rates.

My plan is to connect the machine to my television rather than a monitor. To do this I will a s-video - s-video cable, or a s-video - RGB/Scart with a extra cable to input sound through the scart also.

I have read up on how to set up the xorg.conf file to output via the s-video connection in the various formats (s-video output and rgb scart) and how to putput in different types NTSC and Pal.

Now my question is, I will be using the via drivers for the cle266 chipset from xorg. I wont be using the openchrome drivers as it wont be a game machine and they are essentially the same, except openchrome is like a development branch, correct?

What can I expect from image quality? Is the image likely to be exremely blurry and unfocesed?

This machine will be the only desktop I have in the house, all my university work will be performed on the machine through TV. I will be sitting roughly 1 - 1.5 metres away, so I will obviously need a resolution of 1024x768 or below, anything higher means I will be unable to read the screen. The resolution I will be using is likely to be 700 x xxx

Will my idea of connecting the machine through the tv result in a terrible picture that is unreadable. I understand people use this procedure for mythtv and freevo, so surly the image would be good for using as a desktop?

My main concern is that the image will be fuzzy/blurry and really flickery making it useless to use, which obviously is bad as it will be my only usable omputer in the house.

What are your opinions on my idea? Has anyone tried this before? If so what was the image quality like? Ws it usable? Ws it almost as good as with a standard monitor? Does the image scaling the television do cause any problems etc?

Thanks in advance

Michael.