Difference between revisions of "How to get TV-Out working on ATI graphic cards"
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This HOWTO should help you enable TV-Out support on your ATI Radeon or ATI Rage based ThinkPad. | This HOWTO should help you enable TV-Out support on your ATI Radeon or ATI Rage based ThinkPad. | ||
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| − | ==== | + | == Using the GATOS driver == |
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| − | + | At the [http://gatos.sf.net/ GATOS webpage] one can find the ati.2 driver, a drm-module for the kernel and some additional software. When combined this suffice to get the TV-Out of ATI Radeon (Mobility) chips activated. Yet the information and the software there seem to be a bit out of date. | |
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==Using atitvout== | ==Using atitvout== | ||
Revision as of 00:20, 18 August 2005
This HOWTO should help you enable TV-Out support on your ATI Radeon or ATI Rage based ThinkPad.
Using the GATOS driver
At the GATOS webpage one can find the ati.2 driver, a drm-module for the kernel and some additional software. When combined this suffice to get the TV-Out of ATI Radeon (Mobility) chips activated. Yet the information and the software there seem to be a bit out of date.
Using atitvout
Another approach is by using the atitvout tool provided (but no longer maintained) by Lennart Poettering.
The provided archive contains a source release which can be compiled and installed by # make && make install within the extracted directory. The atitvout tool will then be installed to /usr/local/sbin/atitvout.
The tool uses the VESA Bios Extensions (VBE) which are initialized only once during power on. So if you want to use the TV-out, be sure to get the corresponding video device such as a tv connected before powering your ThinkPad. Under some circumstances the tool fails to communicate properly with the VBE Bios. By issuing {{{2}}} atitvout -f t you activate the SVideo output port. The command {{{2}}} atitvout -f l you change the graphics output back to the LCD.
The atitvout doesn't seem to work on higher resolutions. To send a Xserver to a connected video device, it is possible to start a second Xserver e.g. with {{{2}}} startx -- :1 -xf86config XF86Config-4_reduced-resolution. For resolutions up to 1024x768 the switching should work fine.
While this works very well for ordinary X applications, playing video files, say with mplayer or xine might result in wrong aspect ratio or otherwise distorted output.
Switch to a text console (preferably a non framebufferd one) and issue an {{{2}}} atitvout -f t. Then start {{{2}}} mplayer -vo svga and the filename and other options needed. After enjoying the show, switch back with {{{2}}} atitvout -f l.
