Radeon 7500 TV-out problems
 

Hello
I'm having problems with my Radeon 7500 TV-out. If I boot with the S-video cable disconnected there seems to be no way to activate the tv-out (I tried atitvout, it did nothing but tell me that I have no tv-out ;)). If I boot with the cable connected all works fine but X won't start (in short it says "no screens found"). Cable being connected at boot atitvout finds my tv-out and tells me it's on, but still I can't affect to it with atitvout.

Now the real problem is, that I can't get mplayer to play any movies without X. I tried all the video-out devices that "mplayer -vo help" gives me, but none of them works.

Anyone who knows how to solve my problem (that is to get the tv-out to work, if under X the better) please help me.

Yesterday evening I was at the same point as you. Today I'm one step further. I was able to start X after using the vesa driver. I did it with sax2:

sax2 -m 0=vesa

This allowed me to configure an 800x600x60Hz mode. (Maybe other modes are possible, I admit I didn't try).

Unfortunately the vesa driver cannot make use of any hardware accelleration features of the radeon card, e.g. hardware zoom for fullscreen playback. You can use software scaling with

mplayer -vop scale -zoom <file>

but my system (AMD K6-2 500MHz) is too slow for that. mplayer drops frames then and the movie playback is not smooth. And of course, the 60Hz refresh rate limits the use of this mode to watching movies on TV.

That's why I created two XF86Config files (one for watching TV and one for working) and modified /etc/init.d/xdm to copy the right one into place, depending on if atitvout shows the TV out or not:

case "$1" in
start)
# Is TV-Out active?
if /usr/local/sbin/atitvout detect | grep -q TV; then
echo -n "Starting service $DM (with TV-Out)"
cp /etc/X11/XF86Config.tvout /etc/X11/XF86Config
else
echo -n "Starting service $DM (no TV-Out)"
cp /etc/X11/XF86Config.notv /etc/X11/XF86Config
fi

So if I have plugged in the TV, the system comes up with vesa 800x600x60 mode, if not, radeon 1024x768 is used.

BTW, how is your TV display quality? For watching movies it is ok, but text is not readable.

I don't know why the radeon driver cannot set up the same display mode as vesa does. I'm still trying to find out.

Some more results from my further testings:

I was able to set a resolution of 1024x768 for the monitor with sax2 when using the vesa driver. The card seems to scale that down to 800x600 for the TV automatically. But the refresh rate is still at flickering 60Hz. I didn't find how to change this.

I can start mplayer from the console (without X). According to the mplayer stdout it uses sdl per default, which seems to be the best matching driver. I also could choose directfb, fbdev, but these didn't seem to support scaling to full screen.

I realized that the movies play much smoother in fullscreen without X so I guess I'll prefer playing this way, since 60Hz is a real pain for the eyes.

I have a similar issue with a Radeon 7500. Does anyone have an XF86Config file that will allow tvout to work?

TIA

Ron

Heh... This is the only thing keeping me from using *nix exclusively. If someone has a XF86Config for this or perhaps even a link that could clue me in... :)

Thx.

some more info on this here

http://www.mail-archive.com/devel@xf.../msg02984.html

apparently the server doesn't find any valid modes for the tv-out so it can't set up a clone display which is why the error (no valid screens) comes up.