[AuckLUG] Ati radeon 9600 opensuse 10.1 TV out --> svideo input of TV

[Daniel Pittman]

Barefoot Genius <barefootgenius at gmail.com> writes:

> Does anybody have any idea why playing a video will work perfectly on
> the computer screen but be blank on the TV?

Yup.

> The drivers are working fine, TV out works fine (clone mode), but any
> video played on the computer (either in full screen or in a window)
> plays fine on the LCD but is blank on the TV.  It was doing the same
> thing under XP but setting the card to theater mode for the TV out
> fixed that.  Is it a limitation of the video players (mplayer, vlc)?
> Do I have to set up dual head mode in sax2 (works fine as a clone
> without doing that so far)?

Oh, you actually wanted to know why. ;)

The short answer is that you are using hardware acceleration to play the
video, and the hardware accelerator is rather limited on ATI cards of
that vintage.

Depending on the way things are configured you will see the video on one
head only, and the background color used to determine where to draw
video on the other.

This isn't something that the player applications can change (unless
they hit the hardware directly) but it is something that you may be able
to fix.

The "OverlayOnCRTC2" option for the "radeon" X.org driver I have here is
documented to control this, in part:

    Force hardware overlay to clone head.
    The default value is off.

I believe that some combinations parts of the "MergeFB" stuff can make
this work between the two heads, but not all that reliably -- and I
think it varies between hardware models as well. :/

Anyway, that is the place to start looking further -- the X.org radeon
driver.

Regards,
        Daniel
-- 
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