Hi All,

I am having trouble outputting video to my TV.

I am not trying to do a dual monitor setup, but just output it to my TV to serve as a media box.

Distro: Mandrake 10.x community version.
Video Card: Riva TNT2 video card with an S-Video output.
I am connecting that output to my TV's composite video input via an s-video to composite cable.

I can get output on the screen. However, the text is unreadable. I can read it by using KMagnifier, but using no such aid, it is incredibly hard to read.

I have tried changing resolutions. Even the lowest resolution at 640x480 is unreadable. Also at this resolution, and more so at higher resolutions, I cannot view the whole desktop.

Thanks in advance for any help.

Justin

You could try playing with the flicker filter in the nvidia-settings panel, but atm it doesn't keep those settings and you have to set them again whenever you start x

I am not quite sure how to access that?

Can you try to describe how to access the nvidia-settings panel?

Can I run it from command line? Is it a thing within Mandrake?

Thanks for your help,

Justin

The nvidia settings panel is installed along with the nvidia drivers
Type nvidia-settings in a terminal

Also, this is assuming you are using the Twinview function? Not sure if it will do anything with xinerama

I am not sure what Twinview is. Also, I believe I am using the stock drivers that Mandrake detected. Do I need to upgrade?

Thanks for the help,

Justin

I'm not sure which drivers Mandrake uses (I'm on slack) but have a look in the Device section of /etc/X11/xorg.conf and see what is listed next to Driver.

If you install nvidia drivers you will need to read up on activating twinview and edit your xorg.conf manually ( make a backup like xorg.keep in case you need to go back )

Readme: ftp://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Li...676/README.txt

Appendix G has most of the info about twinview

The driver in xorg.conf says 'nv'. Is this to one you are referring to?
How do I find out the version?

Thanks,

Justin

There's 2 types of drivers available: nv and nvidia. 'nv' is open source, doesn't directly support TV-out and 3d acceleration. 'nvidia' is Nvidia's proprietary driver supporting TV-out and 3d acceleration. With 'nv', you need to use nvtv to kick-in the TV out. nvtv tends to be fiddlier, but is fairly OK for non-3d use. Nvidia's driver works, but I found problems with video scaling. I decided not to use it because of this and other problems (not being able to finely adjust brightness/contrast with nvidia-settings at that time and use a custom resolution). I found nv/nvtv to have better video quality.

Nvidia have removed support for older cards after version 1.0-7174, so select this version if you choose their driver. You will probably need a more recent version of nvidia-settings utility to adjust brightness/contrast/sharpness (also available with nvtv).

I'd probably suggest you give nvtv a go first. Make sure you select all your options (PAL/NTSC, X resolution, S-video output, sharpness) before pressing "apply", or else you could be stuck. Once you are happy, you'll need to create a command line to automatically apply these settings so your desktop environment can run it upon startup.

EDIT:
With Nvidia's drivers, you'll need to edit xorg.conf to include the necessary settings (PAL/NTSC, overscan), adjust nvidia-settings and have them loaded on desktop environment startup.

You can get nvtv here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/nv-tv-out
Nvidia's drivers: http://www.nvidia.com/object/linux_display_archive.html