TV Out on ATI Radeon 7500

traene · 07-14-2007, 07:57 AM

I am trying to connect a TV to my computer. When i start it displays the
console output on TV as well as on the monitor. (good!)

However i have troubles configuring Xorg for displaying on the TV, when in X.
I have tried the following Xorg config:

Code:

...
Section "Device"
        Identifier      "ATI RADEON RV200 QW"
        Driver          "radeon"
        Option          "AGPMode"       "4"
        Option          "AGPFastWrite"  "yes"
        Option          "IgnoreEDID"    "true"
        Option          "MonitorLayout" "NONE, CRT"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
        Identifier      "TV Monitor"
        HorizSync       30-40
        VertRefresh     60
        ModeLine        "800x600" 40.00 800 840 968 1056 600 601 605 628
EndSection

Section "Screen"
        Identifier      "TV Screen"
        Device          "ATI RADEON RV200 QW"
        Monitor         "TV Monitor"
        DefaultDepth    16
        SubSection "Display"
                Depth   16
                Modes   "800x600"
        EndSubSection
EndSection
...

The TV shows something, but no clear picture.

lspci gives:
02:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Radeon RV200 QW [Radeon 7500]

uname -r
2.6.21.3

When using vesa, i get a working image on the TV, however, CPU is rather
busy, and some frames are dropped.

When searching for TV out on ATI cards, i found the following link:
http://www.ece.auckland.ac.nz/~wsun013/tvout/index.html

However, this is no help.

Has anybody experience in this?

Kahless · 07-16-2007, 12:15 AM

you might try running at 640x480
make sure the refresh rate is OK

These links might help

BE CAREFUL WITH THIS PROJECT! SENDING THE WRONG REFRESH RATES TO YOUR TV OR AN UNSUPPORTED RESOLUTION MAY DESTROY IT! I have never seen this actually happen, but I have heard over and over that it can.

http://www.mythtv.org/pipermail/myth...il/038182.html

http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_TV-Out

mstephens · 08-02-2007, 06:28 AM

Hi there

I have same problem with exactly the same card. I am running ubuntu 7.04 (feisty fawn apparently!)on a P400.

Anyway to save you going down some dead ends:

a. Don't even look at the closed source ATI fgrlx drivers - they are not compatible with Radeon cards numbered < 8500.

b. You can do some DOS /Windows ATI bios reconfiguration using Atiflash (DOS program to get/rewrite bios to/from file) and Radedit (Windows prog to edit ATI bios i.e. the file you got using atiflash). The only useful thing I was able to do was set the default output to PAL rather than NTSC which seems to have nicely centred the display on the TV (when using VESA drivers) but not a lot else. ( the monitor display is way out but you can't have everything!)

c. There is a linux program "atitvout" which is supposed to control output to the VGA and SVideo ports. I neded to use the -r option to force it into radeon mode and although it happily accepts commands and says the TV / CRT are active or not, it has absolutely no effect on anything. Reading various stuff on the net suggests that it only works at 800 x600 and many people have ended up using it with the VESA drivers rather than ati/radeon. Since mine already works with 800x 600 VESA anyway, I just gave up.

d. Using VESA driver flips the 7500 into a mode which completely ignores all its radeon features- hence you get the jumpy video playback etc as it is behaving like a bog standard SVGA card. Interestingly (or not), when I had a vertical refresh limit set in xorg.conf, the claimed refresh rate on the X desktop is 61 Hz (possibly really 60) but when I commented out the refresh limits entirely, it jumped to 100 Hz. However disconnecting the monitor before rebooting results in you getting 800x600 as the only possible resolution and the refresh is reset to 61 Hz again. I don't think there is anything which can be done to enhance the VESA drivers. Maybe they work better with a faster CPU but if I was going to spend money, I would sling the Radeon 7500 card anyway.

e. I am not entirely clear whether the tv-out patches (from GATOS) to the ati drivers work with Xorg or not. I am still working on this and trying to get my head round the Ubuntu way of working at the same time.

Basically all I am after is the ability to clone the display onto a LCD TV using the s-video output i.e what I can already do with the VESA drivers but with acceptable performance.

mstephens · 08-03-2007, 05:25 AM

A bit more info.

a. I do not believe that the GATOS package downloadable for Ubuntu actually contains any code for TV output and is only there for TV input. I have tried it out and the TVOutput parameter is xorg.conf is "not used" by the Radeon driver according to the log file. I think this is xorg's polite way of saying it doesn't understand the parameter in that context. I had a look inside radeon_drv.so using hd and there seems to be no text relating to TV output i.e. I can't find any mention of TVOutput and the values PAL and NTSC only seem to be used by stuff to do with input.

Looking at various websites, there is an indication that TVOut is a separate strand of work using some of the GATOS code. So what I have currently got so far is :

1. The proprietary ATI driver - fglrx do not support any Radeon cards prior to 8500 (and latest versions may actually be worse since they mention dropping R200 support) but do support TV output.

2. The VESA driver will support TV output but the performance isn't that good. If you just want to look at fairly static stuff on the TV screen, this is the one for you as it seems to just work without any real effort. If you want to default the card to PAL or NTSC, flash an edited copy of the BIOS using the DOS/Windows tools in my previous post. If you do want to watch video, use Mplayer rather than Totem (the player installed by default on Ubuntu) as it seems to perform far better. As far as I can tell, the VESA drivers do not support hardware rescaling, so full screen is only possible using software rescaling. It may also be worth looking at the Geexbox LiveCD distribution which seems to use VESA drivers and get a reasonable output - this may be due to settings in the mplayer.conf file or simply that the Geexbox setup is optimised to do one thing at a time and you don't have a whole lot of background stuff using the CPU. Anyway, copying over some of the configuration settings may be worth doing.

3. The Xorg ati/radeon driver situation seems to be a bit of a mess. You are supposed to specify ati in the conf file and it will go and load the radeon driver for the cards which need it. In practise, I don't think it matters whether you say "ati" or "radeon" if you have a Radeon card. The drivers as provided do not support TV output. Neither does downloading GATOS which simply adds TV input. What you need to do is find the TV output stuff which is indicated in this wiki

http://wiki.cchtml.com/index.php/Tvout

but bear in mind that the driver versions in the wiki are out of date and you need to get the latest matching versions of each and try to create a new driver from them following instructions which invariably are not quite correct !

The fact that you have a "radeon" driver which might include TV input support OR TV Output support OR both OR neither, and not know which one you have is a good indication as to why Linux, in all its variations is unlikely to replace Microsoft Windows in the near future.

As a friend of mine said many years ago: "Good documentation is a bad thing, think of the future generations of programmers who you are depriving of work"

mstephens · 08-03-2007, 10:01 AM

I had to adjust my partitions (very painful) to make room for the development system on what was supposed to be a minimal Ubuntu install but I have finally cracked it.

The instructions on the wiki above actually work ! - apart from the fact that I don't have wget but the simple workaround is to just use the web browser and save the relevant files as I probably would have done anyway.

It seems you can safely ignore the fact that the radeon driver has moved on considerably from version 6.6.3 - indeed if you don't the patches won't work. Anyway, the patched 6.6.3 radeon driver works fine with Ubuntu 7.04. The changes to the xorg.conf need to be exactly as in the wiki and you need to get rid of any other extraneous resolutions so that xorg doesn't get chance to start being clever and try to switch you to something else. Also NTSC seems to be a better fit than PAL on the TV screen and the monitor (although still slightly offset on the latter) so if you have the choice I would stick with NTSC.