Opensource TV Out Issues

[Alex Deucher]

On Tue, Jun 10, 2008 at 7:56 PM, Paul Jones <raptorman18 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello, I"m having some issues with the opensource radeon driver's tv-out
> settings on my ati mobility radeon 9000. I like to use the xrandr interface
> on my Dell D600 laptop, which is currently running Debian Lenny, 2.6.24, and
> whatever version of the ati drivers that is currently in testing.
>
> I get the TV to display the same thing as my monitor with the following
> commands and they work well.
>
> xrandr --addmode S-video 800x600
> xrandr --outut LVDS --mode 800x600
> xrandr --output S-video --set tv_vertical_position 5 --mode 800x00 --same-as
> LVDS
>
> However, there is a good region at the bottom of the screen that is not
> covered, because the image of my desktop on the TV is too small. So I'm
> wondering if there is any overscan setting that exists, or is in the works,
> and how long before we can expect to see it. I'm also wondering if there is
> some other possible work around. There is a setting currently available
> through xrandr to adjust the horizontal size (tv_horizontal_size) but there
> does not appear to be a command to adjust the vertical size
> (tv_vertical_size doesn't exist?), which could possibly solve my problem,
> since even when I have overscan on in Windows XP with the factory drivers,
> the overscan would leave portions of the screen cutoff.
>

Tv-out can in theory scale any mode to standard tv modes, however, we
only have support in the driver for 800x600 right now.  Since your
LVDS native mode is probably larger than 800x600, there will be a part
the tv cannot display.

> I also want to report a bug that may be of interest, but I'm not even sure
> if it is a bug: When I set the S-Video output I like to turn off my monitor
> with the command xrandr --output LVDS --off. This way I don't feel like I'm
> putting extra life on my laptop monitor and power sources, when I'm using
> TV-Out for extended time periods. However, when I do this and try to
> fullscreen the video player, X completely crashes and takes me back to the
> gdm. So, I don't know if it's something I'm doing wrong or a capability we
> just don't have yet.

Can you start X in gdb and get a backtrace?
http://www.x.org/wiki/Development/Documentation/ServerDebugging


Alex