SLackware with TV

evilDagmar · 12-04-2007, 04:12 AM

Wow. No... Please don't -20 renice anything. Just using -6 is enough to give a process higher priority than just about everything working closely with the kernel (which includes udev and kjournald, ahem). Merely using -1 is enough to put a process at a higher priority than every other joe user process on the machine.

Some rules to remember about nVidia cards and S-Video output:

* xrandr isn't really needed, provided everything is fully defined and properly configured.

* You can use "cloned" mode (which is the default you get when you power on the PC with something connected to the S-Video port) that puts the same image on both displays, but it can only keep doing this if you are using display settings for the (shared) output that are close to compatible with the type of display you have, meaning a vertical refresh of 50Hz for PAL and 60Hz for NTSC, and a resolution no higher than 1024x768 (800x600 for some older cards). If you exceed these, the S-Video output will be disabled. Yes, your TV can only do 525 (slight more with PAL) scan lines at best, so expect that the video card is doing hardware-based rescaling to make the higher-resolution image fit (and can do so more easily than your software scaler).

* There are two mechanisms for nVidia users to bind multiple monitors together. One is to use TwinView mode (read the nVidia driver README and it gives detailed information about how to do this) which makes the video card driver treat both monitors as if they were one really wide one. Xinerama makes xorg treat the two monitors as if they were one. Neither is really necessary. Provided you explicitly specify both displays in your xorg.conf you can then use `DISPLAY=:0.1 xterm` or whatever to spawn stuff to the second screen (which is handy if you want to force mplayer to do full screen on one or the other monitor).

* I've only personally tested with seven or eight different cards from various manufacturers (of nVidia-chipset cards), but it does seem that one gets brighter, clearer images using higher resolutions rather than lower. One universal constant is that no-name cards tend to have cheap electronics driving the S-Video port that will give a crappy-looking output.

* Magic! - If you are trying to control the de-interlacer manually, and you are using the nVidia binary driver, stop now!. The nVidia binary driver contains a bit of magic that will automatically interlace anything played through xvideo using XvMC (which is the "normal" way for most players). Don't question it, just know that it's in there. I mess with MythTV quite a bit and have had to do exactly nothing to get interlacing stuffs to happen correctly.

* Overscan - If you're wondering why you're missing the outer 5% of the screen on the TV, it's because you're supposed to. This is "overscan". See http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php...erscan_and_You for some detail on it, but it's supposed to be hidden. If it's not, then with just about any card that cost more than $16, you can use nvidia-settings to adjust it (and the images at that link can be used to calibrate this very exactly).

zux · 12-04-2007, 05:41 AM

i tried the overscaning but it doesn't solve the problem. when I set the overscan on 0 I can see the picture in the middle of the screen, blank areas all around it but the right and bottom sides are still cut off.

dive · 12-04-2007, 08:11 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by evilDagmar

Provided you explicitly specify both displays in your xorg.conf you can then use `DISPLAY=:0.1 xterm` or whatever to spawn stuff to the second screen (which is handy if you want to force mplayer to do full screen on one or the other monitor).

This is how I do it, but I still get cut off with mplayer in fullscreen unless I use xrandr to make both displays the same size. Maybe it's a bug in Mplayer that only reads the resolution of monitor 1 instead of monitor 2 (TV)?

Code:

Section "ServerLayout"
     Identifier     "X.org Configured"
     Screen      0  "Screen0" 0 0
     Screen      1  "Screen1" RightOf "Screen0"
     InputDevice    "Mouse0" "CorePointer"
     InputDevice    "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
EndSection

Section "ServerFlags"
     Option "Xinerama" "false"
EndSection

dive · 12-04-2007, 10:06 AM

My mail to mplayer user list hasn't been answered. Looking through the docs the recommended way to use TV out with mp is to use Twinview in clone mode, rendering both screens unusable. So I guess that's the best we can hope really. At least with my method I can still use my monitor at 1024x768 while watching a movie.

zux · 12-04-2007, 11:32 AM

well I still use 1152x864 for my monitor and miss a smaller part of the movie than before. I had 800x600 for the tv before and could not see a bigger part of the movie

let me now if mplayer mail list gets you some answer