How to get TV-Out working on ATI graphic cards

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Revision as of 10:59, 14 October 2005 by Wyrfel (Talk | contribs) (Using atitvout)
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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 Yet the information and the software there seem to be a bit out of date.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Another approach is by using the atitvout tool provided (but no longer maintained) by Lennart Poettering.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 $ atitvout -f t you activate the SVideo output port. The command $ 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 $ 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 $ atitvout -f t. Then start $ mplayer -vo svga and the filename and other options needed. After enjoying the show, switch back with $ atitvout -f l.


ThinkPads this has been successfully tested on

A30p