[Klug-general] VGA Card TV out problems

[Karl Lattimer]

On Wed, 2007-06-20 at 11:10 +0100, James Mallery wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> Having problems getting the TV out functionality working on both my
> and a friends Linux installations.  My friend Nathan Friend told me
> that he attended a KLUG meet where you had TV out running nicely on a
> few machines. 
> I'm using a ATI Radeon 9200 - can only get part 3/4 of my desktop on
> screen whether I use the default Radeon driver that Sax2 uses or the
> latest official ATI driver, which I used to create a 'distribution
> specific' package using the kernel source.  

ATI sucks, I don't know about TV-out on modern ATI cards, however I did
do some work with http://gatos.sourceforge.net/ in order to get a 7000
series radeon working with TVout, and it worked quite nicely (800x600
only) 

If the hacks on that site are still valid, and you are using the open
source ATI driver rather than the proprietary driver then please be
aware, the hacks required to get that working are about 3 days work
battling with all kinds of horrific patching and building.

However I suspect that this is mostly a resolution problem, so the
easiest fix would probably be to drop your resolution down to 800x600
and see if that fixes it, then if it does...

Stab yourself in the knee for buying an ATI card that can only do sync
resolution of multi-monitors ;P

> My friends using a NVidia Geforce 4MX - with the drivers his PCLinuxOS
> distro installed the TV out was in black and white (his TV supports
> both PAL and NTSC) and when I installed the official driver the TV out
> came out as a complete grey mess on screen.  We are both using s-video
> leads to connect. 

You aren't using a TV with S-Video input so only one of the channels in
S-Video is being used. There are a few fixes for this, buy a TV with
S-Video input or build a small circuit to do the Y/C to composite
conversion, you can find out quite a bit about this on this post to
planet.ubuntu.com yesterday

http://albertomilone.com/wordpress/?p=97

Check the comments ;)

> Is there any default/failsafe settings that can be put into xorg.conf
> that will help?  Could anybody, who has a similar card, e-mail me
> their xorg.conf files so I can compare?

In the xorg.conf I have the following device section

Section "Device"    
        Identifier  "Videocard0"
        Driver      "nvidia" 
        VendorName  "Videocard vendor"
        BoardName   "NVIDIA GeForce 4 MX (generic)"
        Option      "ConnectedMonitor" "TV"
        Option      "TVStandard" "PAL"
EndSection

but that machine is running ONLY on a TV, read the nvidia manual as it
has some handy points, you may find that something like ConnectedMonitor
LCD,TV is a better solution at times.

Of course, nvidia-settings can do all of this for you :)

K,