On 9/3/06, Grant <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > I have a Dell Inspiron 7500 laptop with an ATI Mobility video card. It
> > has an S-video TV-out port that I can't get working. I've read all
> > kinds of stuff about it online, but I'm unsure which way to go.
> >
> > I'm using the "ati" driver right now but I've read that the ati-gatos
> > driver might be better. I haven't even turned this laptop on in quite
> > a while so it's running a lot of old stuff. Should I update x11-xorg
> > to 7.0 and use a particular VIDEO_CARD flag and see if that works? How
> > should my xorg.conf look?
>
> TV-out is probably one of the worst-supported things in X right now.
> There is no "official" X.Org driver that supports it. The gatos driver
> purports to, although it may not work with 7.1. Also I think someone
> posted a patch to the xorg list a few months ago to add it to the ati
> driver.
>
> If you're able to use the binary drivers with your card, you may have
> better luck there.
I'm running out of steam on this for now, but this seems to be the key
component:
http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=127642
it's a patch for xorg 7.0 to enable TV-out with the ati driver. The
old laptop I'm trying to set this up on needs some of work before it's
up to speed and I can test this.
Grant - Here's where I got to today:
1) My machines use the ATI 9100 IGP chipset. No 3D accel. The machines
have both composite video and S-Video outputs.
2) Back under 2.6.16 I used ati-drivers-8.14.x. I had to patch the
drivers by hand. That was painful but well documented on one of the
online forums.
3) The 8.14 driver is no longer in portage and apparently doesn't work
with the 2.6.17 kernels.
4) I got 8.28.8 working today using the following extra line in the
aticonfig-Device[0] section created by aticonfig:
Option "ForceMonitors" "nocrt1,nocrt2,tv"
5) What I found was that during the boot I get text on both the
composite video and S-Video outputs. However, when X starts the
graphic output is only on the S-Video output. This is different than
the older driver where X was available on both.
6) All of that said I've now got both Pundit-R's working. However the
video quality is far worse than the previous driver. It appears that
I'm getting just a few frames of video every second. Video from MythTV
is very jerky and seems to 'tear' a bit.
7) Note that this doesn't seem to be nearly as bad when I configure
the machines to use the CRT output. I'm going to investigatge buying
some sort of VGA->S-Video or Composite video converter. That may work
better and not require all this crazy work.
All in all, very disappointing. I understand the Gentoo devs had
their hands tied on a lot of this stuff but it's disappointing to have
working drivers get dropped from portage or the driver developers at
ATI not continue to move features forward. Or maybe it's still me and
my lack of real configuration knowledge.
Hope this helps,
Mark
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