Problems with TV-out on a Macbook Pro

[Alex Deucher]

On Wed, Sep 2, 2009 at 5:07 PM, Stefan Monnier<monnier at iro.umontreal.ca> wrote:
> Has someone managed to get TV-out working on a Macbook Pro?  Without any
> option in my xorg.conf, `xrandr' only shows me the LVDS and a DVI-0
> output.  This outpout works well when I plug a VGA monitor via Apple's
> adapter, but when I plug the "DVI to Video adapter" (which has both an
> S-Video and a composite output), xrandr tells me that DVI-0 is connected
> but has no modes.
>
> If I try and manually set some modes (mostly trying the ones I found on
> http://www.nexusuk.org/projects/vga2scart/), my TV (connected via the
> composite output) shows some garbled output (maybe just a lack of sync:
> I can barely make out some shapes that relate to the content of my
> screen).
>
> `xrandr --output DVI-0 --set tv_standard ntsc' complains that
> tv_standard is not a known attribute (and indeed `xrandr --verbose'
> does not list it).
>
> If I try to use the "Option ATOMTvOut TRUE" in my xorg.conf, the
> behavior is basically the same, except that I additionally get a 3rd
> output in xrandr, named S-Video, which always says "disconnected".
> If I force it to be considered as connected (with "Option ForceTVOut
> true"), and then activate it, my TV screen (still connected via
> composite since it doesn't have an S-Video input) stays blank.
>
> See https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=23535 if you want to
> see the Xorg.log.  Has anybody seen something like that?
> Found a solution for it?

You'll need to use xf86-video-ati from git master or the stable
6.12-branch and the workaround I described in bug 23535.

Alex