[wplug] ATI Radeon and S-video

Brandon Kuczenski brandon at 301south.net
Tue May 30 03:36:03 EDT 2006


Has anyone here gotten X to work on the S-video output of a dual-output 
Radeon card?  I've been messing with my X configuration trying to get my 
card to drive a signal into a TV and I've gotten all of nowhere.  There's 
a lot of noise on the web about framebuffers, dual head versus cloned 
versus Xinerama, proprietary versus reverse-engineered drivers, etc., and 
I am having a hard time figuring out what is supported and what is simply 
not possible.

My ideal setup would be to be able to use the computer with the one head, 
as I have been, normally, and occasionally fire up the S-video out with a 
totally separate X session to display videos, where I could optimize the 
display resolution and everything.  But again, I have no idea if that's 
possible.

A nice fallback would be to use the comptuer normally, occasionally 
turning on the TV and having a cloned output of the computer's screen, 
downsampled to the TV's resolution (does the framebuffer do that? what 
does the framebuffer do?  What is a framebuffer?  And don't say STFW, 
because the Web doesn't seem to know, either)

Presently I can't get anything to display to the TV at all, except that 
if I boot with it turned on then i get the bootup process, up until X 
starts, at which point it goes to crazy interference.

Any help appreciated.  I don't know what information is relevant to 
provide.  My card is a Radeon 9200 with VGA and S-video out; my X server 
is XFree86 version 4.3.0.1 (Debian) [thanks again for helping me get back 
to XFree86 from Xorg].  I think I understand the XF86Config file pretty 
well at this point.. I just have no idea what to put in it.

An off-list discussion would be fine, also.

Thanks in advance,
Brandon



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