How to enable S-video output on ATI Radeon 4850
 

Dear all,
I try to connect my graphic card with my TV. I have ATI Radeon 4850 card with 7 pins S-video output and I want to connect it my TV using s-video to RCA cable (the RCA output is yelow, red and white, I assume the 7 pins has audio signal as well).

My card doesn't have problem when connect it wit my monitor via DVI, but the S-video out is not detected. How can I enable it? Can I configure the card from KDE? If so, how?

I'm using the driver from Slackware package and I'm using Slackware 13 stable 64.

Any ideas?

Best regards,
ethereal1m

You may have to use AMD's fglrx proprietary driver.

Yves.

what is the proper way to install it?

Well… sorry, I don't know Slackware at all… With Mandriva, I enter the control center, “hardware” section, “display” item. It auto-detects the chipset, and tells me there's a proprietary driver available; do I want to use it or use the free one? There I answer I want the proprietary driver, and it's all done :)

But I've read it's not that hard to install it yourself, using what is available at AMD web site.

Yves.

For slack, the easiest way is to take a look at slackbuilds.org. The packages there work 99.5% of the time. If you don't have anything there, take a look at the ATI (Radeon, right?) website. Sometimes they have linux drivers (Nvidia does), most of the time in a bash script installer. If not, you might have to build it from source, but that's not too bad on slack if you know what you're doing (actually its not bad on any distro if you know what you're doing). 64bit adds a bit more complexity, but it just takes a couple flags and you're all good.

As for the S-Video output, the only way I've found to do that in Slack is to mess with xorg.conf. That's an absolute pain in the butt, so if you want to cheat, just plug in your s-video, and run xorgconfig. That'll get you pretty closely to what you need. You'll have to tweak your previous screen probably back to your old settings, but in theory you'll be able to run both at the same time. I did that with Slack 12.1 (32), and had some luck with it, but I haven't tried with 13.1, nor with slack64 13.1.

Good luck, and let me know what you find! This might turn into a weekend project for me. It's been on my to-do list for a while.

I did install catalyst, but when I plug my S-Video to my TV, some trace (looked like a scrambled picture) of my PC output appeared on the TV screen. How can I tweaked this with xorg.conf? Please be more specific since I'm a beginner in this realm.

With the TV plugged into the S-Video port, what's the output of 'xrandr'?

Adam

xrandr is definitely a good place to look for starters. Tweaking xorg.conf is never an easy thing to do. It'll take a lot of patience and a lot of restarting X.

It sounds like your screens aren't aligned properly in xorg.conf. I'm guessing that what happened is your original screen size has been adjusted to be too large, so it's spilling onto the TV. Look in xorg and make sure that it's the same size it was before.

Here's the prickly part, though. Your s-vid should be on the same device as your first display. I say should because on my laptop...it's not. Don't ask me how that works, because honestly it kinda boggles my mind why they would put the s-vid on integrated graphics and the actual display on discrete--probably a cheap shortcut in making it--that's neither here nor there, however.

So xorg should have some kind of setup like this:

Two screens (most likely 0 and 1)
Two devices (for you it may be the same--in which case you only need the one device declaration)
Two displays (one will be your original monitor and the other will be your TV. Google your TV model for some more specs on what you'll need to put down there. If it's HD, sometimes you can just treat it like a widescreen monitor. Other/older TVs will require a bit of interesting setup. Refresh rate is usually an important aspect then).

In your case, you should have the two displays both on your video card, and the two screens should be aligned so they don't overlap (can't remember how to make sure of that...usually its just "LeftOf Screen0" or something like that).

Hope that helps!

If you installed the ATI catalyst driver you should have ACCC in the settings menu. It should detect your displays, and you should be able to configure the display and Xinerama with the ACCC.