Screen resolution & TV out
 

Hi,

I'm having a bit of an irritating problem - I recently managed to increase my monitor resolution to 1280x1024 by following the instructions in the Mepis wiki. Last night I discovered that my TV out seemed to have stopped working (I have the monitor options set to clone in the Mepis control panel), so I rebooted and it worked again during the boot messages and then died again as soon as X started. The only thing I could think of that I'd done to possibly cause this was the resolution change so I went into the KDE control panel and changed my monitor resolution to 1024x768, hit apply, and the desktop came up on the TV but in black and white...

I've read while hunting around for a solution to this that it may be being caused by the card having decided to use ntsc output instead of PAL, but I can't work out how to check this.

My graphics card is a GeForce FX 5600 running on whichever Nvidia drivers are installed with Mepis 3.3.1, and I'm using S-Video to connect to the TV,

Does anyone have any idea whats going on? any help would be greatly appreciated :)

I think this is adjusted via an option in xorg.conf (XF86.conf)... look for the nvidia driver - there should be a load of options lines under it right?

Alternatively, have a look at:
http://www.sorgonet.com/linux/nvoption/

Hi thanks for that - that nv option didn't fix things, but the script it gave me pointed me in the direction I needed.

I now have tv out working with my monitor set to 1280x1024 and the tv set to 1024x768, in colour. The only problem is that it isn't fitting the whole desktop onto the screen, so its missing a chunk of the bottom right corner,

The screen section in my XF86Config-4 now looks like this:

I think its the SecondMonitorHorizSync and the SecondMonitorVertRefresh I should be changing to fix this but I've no idea what these values should be. I've looked for the correct values online but googling for the tv's specs brings up no useful detail. The TV is a Daewoo GB20C5NS 19".

Does any one have any other suggestions?

Thanks

Let me guess: the tv veiwable screen area has rounded corners? (Otherwise more than just the corner would be missing.) You fix this with the tv remote - adjust the width and height of the display until the whole desktop is visible.

Daewoo Electronics don't list your TV on their site.

Hi. Thanks for the idea, but no its not rounded corners, its like an inch and a half on the bottom and right hand side of the screen have been lopped off, its pretty odd.

I've discovered since that if I modify the metamodes line to read
and restart x then everything fits on the screen fine, but I don't get my 1280x1024 resolution on my monitor, which was what caused all this in the first place...:rolleyes:

So, for now I'm making do with editing this line in the config file and restarting x to make things work properly every time I want to watch a video, but this is slightly inconvenient to say the least...

and no, I can't find anything on the website, or indeed anywhere, about my tv. I would settle for knowing just the average values for a bog standard generic 19" CRT tv at the moment but I can't find anything. Loads of stuff on monitors, but the gods of google were definately not smiling on that particular search.

Its nearly cracked! :scratch: any more ideas?

Presumably you tried resizing/repositioning the picture with the TV menues?
(Sometimes a big picture just gets written off the end of the phospher. The 00 position seems alright but the beam seems to be sweeping too far right and continuing too far down.)

Tried every button on the damn remote, but no joy. Can't suss out whether the screen is resizable, so once again looking for any sort of documentation for this thing... :confused:

Hmmm - had a look myself. If you don't restrict yourself to 19" you can find quite a lot.

Common refresh rates, for eg, is 100Hz - or set to 60Hz.
The cards are supposed get it right automatically. Which is why I'm still thinking of a TV-end issue.
Sometimes you have to boot with the tv plugged in.

Generally - you can experiment with the setting so long as you guess lower. Fiddle and watch what happens.

Thats the really odd bit - I do boot with the TV plugged in - if its switched you can see the full boot process from the moment the PC is switched on, properly sized and in colour, but as soon as X starts all this starts happening.

<sigh>
Have you fiddled?

Did you know there are people with exactly the opposite problem?

Here's the relevant bit of my xorg.conf Gives me 1adequate TV & desktop resolution for the MX4000 but I have got a Panasonic TV that seems to handle just about every format ever invented without batting an eyelid.

Yup - it's the TV.
Twiddle the TV settings on the TV.

thanks for the info but my tv didn't seem to like those refresh settings.

This all works fine if I'm running both screens at 1024x768, its just if I'm using the monitor bumped up to 1280x1024 that I have the problems.

Yes I reckon you're right. I just need to find out how to adjust the screen size on this damn thing :p

I have been faced with the same problem recently, and I think I (theoretically) found the reason and a solution. I say "theoretically" because I have not not tried it in practice, yet.

So, I think that the reason for the problem is that your TV simply cannot handle a resolution of 1280x1024. It can only handle up to 1024x768. It is a hard(ware) limit, so there is no way to get more out of it.
Consequently, you must configure the X server to use a resolution of 1024x768 for your tv, whilst invariably using a resolution of 1280x1024 for your monitor.

There are two ways to achieve it:

A) Use twinview, clone the screen to your tv, and use the MetaModes option to get a different resolution. This is what you do now. This is not the best method, as it results in the problem you described: the screen you see on your tv will only be a an area of size 1024x768 pixels cut out of the entire screen image having dimensions 1280x1024.

B) Not to use twinview (and cloning), but define different X server layouts for your tv and monitor. This practically means, that your XF86Config file should contain separate (and different) serverlayout, device, monitor and screen sections for your tv and monitor. You will find several examples on the internet with some google searching. (I vaguely remember that even the documentation of the nvidia driver contained an example of this configuration). This is the better method, as this gives you the possibility of using different resolutions for your tv and monitor, totally independently of each other.