> on my gateway laptop, graphics chip s3 savage ix/mv i have tvout. xfree > 4.3. running at 800x600 (ie closish to pal). this works fine, and shows > the desktop, although its not that sharp (surprise surprise). using > composite video (tv has no s-video in, lappie has no s-video out) > > however when I play a movie file using xine or mplayer, either full > screen or windowed, it just shows a blue expanse, like a windows BSOD > but without the informative messages. > > any ideas whats going on here? i have tried ntsc and pal output, and two > different movie files (one .avi and one .mov) > > both play fine in the lcd screen attached to the laptop, but > unfortunately it ain't 29 inches and the viewing angle is only so-so. > also to get it close enough to the stereo to plug in the sound it is too > far away from the sofa to be seen at all!
The blue screen is related to using the Xvideo extension. Xvideo (xv) allows software to write directly to video memory data that need colour space conversion (ie: YUV data instead of RGB). The blue window is what X-Windows uses in its own internal memory (I'm not too sure about that side of it). Most modern video cards can do all kinds of this stuff in hardware, which is obviously faster. It would seem that your video card doesn't support xv on the second head (tv-out) - I think this is quite common. To confirm if this is the problem, try running mplayer as: mplayer -vo x11 filename.avi That will force it to do the colour conversion in software. If that works, then it may be okay to just use that when you want TV-out (Since you're probably not using the laptop for other things at the same time, so wasting some CPU doing colour conversion isn't a big deal), or possibly there are some different drivers to help you. Andre
