How to get TV-Out working on ATI graphic cards

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Revision as of 01:06, 16 August 2005 by Macfiron (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

Getting the driver

XFree86

Get the latest version of the GATOS ati.2 driver for your version of XFree86. The ati.2 driver is a replacement for the one provided with the respective XFree86 distribution.

Xorg

For Xorg the ati.2 drivers are already contained within the latest releases. Just copy them to the given directories.

XServer configuration file

The documentation for the driver explains, that you have to add a line to the device section of your graphics adapter: 

Option "TVOutput" "YYY"

where YYY is replaced by the desired video norm. Options are:

  • NTSC
  • NTSC-J
  • PAL
  • PAL-CN
  • PAL-M
  • PAL-N
  • PAL-60

ThinkPads this has been successfully tested on

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Another approach is by using the atitvout tool provided (but no longer maintained) by Lennart Poettering.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 {{{2}}} make and {{{2}}} 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.

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.

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