How to get TV-Out working on ATI graphic cards

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Revision as of 15:02, 26 September 2009 by Bugmenot1 (Talk | contribs) (works on T41 with Radeon 7500 also)
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This HOWTO should help you enable TV-Out support on your ATI Radeon or ATI Rage based ThinkPad.

NOTE!
This page is not applicable to recent ATI Radeon Mobility chips. See ATI Mobility Radeon X300 for a discussion.
NOTE!
If your using a distribution with KMS (Kernel Mode Setting), such as Fedora 11 then you will not have S-video support. This is a known issue. The only workaround is by booting with the nomodeset kernel option.

Using Xrandr

To use the TVout on Radeon 7500 type following:

$  xrandr --output S-video --set load_detection 1 
$  xrandr --addmode S-video 800x600 
$  xrandr --output S-video --mode 800x600 

And set mode PAL or NTSC with:

$  xrandr --output S-video --set tv_standard ntsc 

If you want to use XVideo overlay on TV, try following command:

$  xvattr -a XV_CRTC -v 1 

ThinkPads/Other laptops this has been successfully tested on

  • A30p
  • T30
  • Compaq Evo N800v
  • T40 with Radeon 7500
  • T41 with Radeon 7500
  • T41 with Radeon 9000
  • T42 with Radeon 9600