I was lucky enough to get a 360 yesterday but wasn't able to find the VGA adapter in any store around Vancouver BC. Since my projector (benq 6100) is ceiling mounted and I only ran a VGA cable to my receiver cabinet, I was out of luck for viewing the XBOX without hanging a temporary composite cable in the middle of the room.
So I built a component breakout cable from an old VGA cable and some rca female ends. I have never built any electronic component before and was surprised when it worked! I spent a couple of hours trying to figure out which wire belonged to which hole in the VGA female end and used
http://www.myhometheater.homestead.com/vgacable.html for the pinout diagram. I didn't know what was meant by continuity test until yesterday and didn't own a multimeter so I used a skinny wire stripped from a cat5 cable, D cell battery and a flashlight bulb to test each wire.
Anyways, I was surprised everything worked once I hooked up the XBOX*. At 720p the games look amazing. The BENQ recognized the component source and correctly adjustment for both 720p and 1080i. No ghosting or any other anomalies.
My questions:
1. Did I end up with the same result compared to buying the VGA adapter? Or would the BENQ recognize the VGA adapter differently and possibly give me a better picture?
2. Since the BENQ 6100 is native 4:3, I manually set the projector to 16:9 - Is this correct? Otherwise everything seems a bit stretched vertically.
3. How come TV through the MCE extender only fills about 2/3 width but still full height? I would like to be able to have 4:3 content automatically switch back the projector and Xbox to 4:3. Is this possible?
4. I can't tell the difference between 720p and 1080i? Is this because I don't have 1080i content? In fact I think 720p looks better?
Thanks,
Mike
* Took me a while to find out there is an HD switch on the XBOX component adapter.
