Alright, I'm closer to a newbie than anything else; but I wouldn't say I am completely helpless since I have four friends that just switched to Linux and I'm their designated guru (lord, help them). Here's the breakdown:

...SuSE 10.1, Gnome, Compiz/XGL, nVidia GeForce 6600 GT, nForce2 chipset...

Everything is working great, just one tiny problem. I would like Totem to be able to use Full Screen Video so that I can put SpongeBob on for my son on the TV while I get my work done. From my assumption, Totem's TV-Out options for nVidia cards are provided from the dependency of libnvtv. This brings me to understand that the reason that's causing these options to be deactivated in Totem is probably the same reason I get this readout from running nvtv:
Fatal: No supported video card found.

This made me ponder, if I didn't have the nVidia drivers properly installed, I'm damn lucky to have Compiz/XGL running. I already have the dual head mode enabled using SaX2 (Clone Mode) and it works fine for tv display. When I run lspci it recognizes my video card:
02:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation NV43 [GeForce 6600/GeForce 6600 GT] (rev a2)

I'll be hunting down the answer all at work, but with my already fruitless attempts, I have little faith, so I present the issue here.

Alright, I did something to SaX2 and now Compiz/XGL isn't working, but only on one user profile. I know /etc/X11/xorg.conf is fine, but I'm a bit confused of what configuration file in ~/ is effected by SaX2, so I can restore to the point prior to my ignorant meddling. I've pondered just creating a new account and customizing all my settings there and then deleting the old account, but that seems like an arduous answer to what could be a simple issue.

Well, I'll be wading through log files tonight to see what I can find, but if someone knows the effected file off hand, feel free to give me a little help.

(edit: no idea what sax2 is, even after looking at the website... /edit)

nvtv is not going to work on your card, it's too new. I have a similar hardware setup to you (nforce2, 6600gt), though I'm using KDE (I assume you're using gnome). When I first setup TV out, it was with a dual-screen setup which had a separate desktop on the TV, virtually above my monitor. like so:
with this setup, I would browse to, and run the file I wanted to play on the TV's desktop. This turned out to be rather tedious(nothing fits on the screen at 640x480, and it's impossible to read text at higher resolutions), but it's the best option (that I know of at least) if you want to use the TV to play video and do things on the monitor(s) at the same time.

now though, I just use a regular single-monitor setup for my desktop, and launch another X server to the TV when I want to watch something, instead of having a desktop on the TV all the time. I use mplayer, but I'm sure you could use whatever player you want.

my current serverlayout(s) look like this:
and I use a basic script to launch an X server to display :1 with -layout TV, run mplayer, and set some nvidia settings so the video syncs to the TV and doesn't tear on panning shots and high-motion stuff.

this is no good if you want to play a video on the TV and work on the monitor at the same time though, and if you VT-switch from the TV to monitor and back, the nvidia-settings are un-set (reminding me of how unimpressed I was with nvidia's drivers on windows, but that's a whole other rant).

A couple notes on nvidia's drivers: with the last version (8762), the nvidia-settings would not always get set, it was hit and miss (that's why the sleep command was in there, not that it helped), the new version (8774) doesn't have this issue (yay). The issue the current version retains however is this: if you go back and forth from X to standard VTs a lot, get used to the idea of not use the framebuffer console - once you run something on a display connected through s-video, attempting to leave X to go to the console will result in a totally borked display, but you'll still be able to enter commands and such (to reboot obviously), you just won't be able to see any typos you make(ctrl alt del works nicely here). using a standard VGA console eliminates this issue. not as nice as a 1024x768 framebuffer console, but thems the breaks I guess.

not sure of any other ways to do it, hope that helps. I'll to try help more if I can, but I got this set up basically through trial-and-error so no promises.


If I can do some minimal thread-hijacking here, can anyone tell me if there's a simple way I can tie the X server in my script to mplayer, so that when mplayer gets to the end of the video and quits, it takes down the X server with it??

the answer is
pkill -f "layout TV"