[gentoo-user] ATI Mobility TV-OUT

[gentoo-user] ATI Mobility TV-OUT

[Grant]

I have a Dell Inspiron 7500 laptop with an ATI Mobility video card. It
has an S-video TV-out port that I can't get working. I've read all
kinds of stuff about it online, but I'm unsure which way to go.

I'm using the "ati" driver right now but I've read that the ati-gatos
driver might be better. I haven't even turned this laptop on in quite
a while so it's running a lot of old stuff. Should I update x11-xorg
to 7.0 and use a particular VIDEO_CARD flag and see if that works? How
should my xorg.conf look?

I've also read that atitvout should help but it doesn't seem to be in
portage and its homepage says it is no longer maintained.

- Grant
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Re: [gentoo-user] ATI Mobility TV-OUT

[Janusz Bossy]

On 9/3/06, Grant <emailgrant@gmail.com> wrote:
> I've also read that atitvout should help but it doesn't seem to be in
> portage and its homepage says it is no longer maintained.

I had a HP-Compaq notebook with ATI mobility card and atitvout worked
fine for me. Back then it was in portage and was maintained.

-- 
Pozdrawiam
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gg# 791964
tlen yanoushek@tlen.pl
jabber yanoushek@chrome.pl
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Re: [gentoo-user] ATI Mobility TV-OUT

[Mark Knecht]

Grant,
   I have some Pundit-R machines that may have a similar ATI chip.
Mine is a 9100 IGP. What is in yours?

   On my Pundits I'm running xorg 7.0 and 8.27.10. I have S-Video
working on one but not the other. I'm working on that as I write.

   If you think anything I have might be of use feel free to write me
off-line. Like you I'm finding the ATI support in the Gentoo Wiki
somewhat out of date for 7.0 and the newer drivers. Much of what used
to work on these machines no longer works at all. Unfortunately I'm
not qualified to get it working quickly so I'm in pain over here.

Cheers,
Mark

On 9/3/06, Grant <emailgrant@gmail.com> wrote:
> I have a Dell Inspiron 7500 laptop with an ATI Mobility video card. It
> has an S-video TV-out port that I can't get working. I've read all
> kinds of stuff about it online, but I'm unsure which way to go.
>
> I'm using the "ati" driver right now but I've read that the ati-gatos
> driver might be better. I haven't even turned this laptop on in quite
> a while so it's running a lot of old stuff. Should I update x11-xorg
> to 7.0 and use a particular VIDEO_CARD flag and see if that works? How
> should my xorg.conf look?
>
> I've also read that atitvout should help but it doesn't seem to be in
> portage and its homepage says it is no longer maintained.
>
> - Grant
> --
> gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
>
>
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Re: [gentoo-user] ATI Mobility TV-OUT

[Donnie Berkholz]

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Grant wrote:
> I have a Dell Inspiron 7500 laptop with an ATI Mobility video card. It
> has an S-video TV-out port that I can't get working. I've read all
> kinds of stuff about it online, but I'm unsure which way to go.
> 
> I'm using the "ati" driver right now but I've read that the ati-gatos
> driver might be better. I haven't even turned this laptop on in quite
> a while so it's running a lot of old stuff. Should I update x11-xorg
> to 7.0 and use a particular VIDEO_CARD flag and see if that works? How
> should my xorg.conf look?

TV-out is probably one of the worst-supported things in X right now.
There is no "official" X.Org driver that supports it. The gatos driver
purports to, although it may not work with 7.1. Also I think someone
posted a patch to the xorg list a few months ago to add it to the ati
driver.

If you're able to use the binary drivers with your card, you may have
better luck there.

Thanks,
Donnie


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Re: [gentoo-user] ATI Mobility TV-OUT

[Grant]

> > I have a Dell Inspiron 7500 laptop with an ATI Mobility video card. It
> > has an S-video TV-out port that I can't get working. I've read all
> > kinds of stuff about it online, but I'm unsure which way to go.
> >
> > I'm using the "ati" driver right now but I've read that the ati-gatos
> > driver might be better. I haven't even turned this laptop on in quite
> > a while so it's running a lot of old stuff. Should I update x11-xorg
> > to 7.0 and use a particular VIDEO_CARD flag and see if that works? How
> > should my xorg.conf look?
>
> TV-out is probably one of the worst-supported things in X right now.
> There is no "official" X.Org driver that supports it. The gatos driver
> purports to, although it may not work with 7.1. Also I think someone
> posted a patch to the xorg list a few months ago to add it to the ati
> driver.
>
> If you're able to use the binary drivers with your card, you may have
> better luck there.

I'm running out of steam on this for now, but this seems to be the key
component:

http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=127642

it's a patch for xorg 7.0 to enable TV-out with the ati driver.  The
old laptop I'm trying to set this up on needs some of work before it's
up to speed and I can test this.

- Grant
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Re: [gentoo-user] ATI Mobility TV-OUT

[Mark Knecht]

On 9/3/06, Grant <emailgrant@gmail.com> wrote:
> > > I have a Dell Inspiron 7500 laptop with an ATI Mobility video card. It
> > > has an S-video TV-out port that I can't get working. I've read all
> > > kinds of stuff about it online, but I'm unsure which way to go.
> > >
> > > I'm using the "ati" driver right now but I've read that the ati-gatos
> > > driver might be better. I haven't even turned this laptop on in quite
> > > a while so it's running a lot of old stuff. Should I update x11-xorg
> > > to 7.0 and use a particular VIDEO_CARD flag and see if that works? How
> > > should my xorg.conf look?
> >
> > TV-out is probably one of the worst-supported things in X right now.
> > There is no "official" X.Org driver that supports it. The gatos driver
> > purports to, although it may not work with 7.1. Also I think someone
> > posted a patch to the xorg list a few months ago to add it to the ati
> > driver.
> >
> > If you're able to use the binary drivers with your card, you may have
> > better luck there.
>
> I'm running out of steam on this for now, but this seems to be the key
> component:
>
> http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=127642
>
> it's a patch for xorg 7.0 to enable TV-out with the ati driver.  The
> old laptop I'm trying to set this up on needs some of work before it's
> up to speed and I can test this.
>

Grant - Here's where I got to today:

1) My machines use the ATI 9100 IGP chipset. No 3D accel. The machines
have both composite video and S-Video outputs.

2) Back under 2.6.16 I used ati-drivers-8.14.x. I had to patch the
drivers by hand. That was painful but well documented on one of the
online forums.

3) The 8.14 driver is no longer in portage and apparently doesn't work
with the 2.6.17 kernels.

4) I got 8.28.8 working today using the following extra line in the
aticonfig-Device[0] section created by aticonfig:

        Option      "ForceMonitors" "nocrt1,nocrt2,tv"

5) What I found was that during the boot I get text on both the
composite video and S-Video outputs. However, when X starts the
graphic output is only on the S-Video output. This is different than
the older driver where X was available on both.

6) All of that said I've now got both Pundit-R's working. However the
video quality is far worse than the previous driver. It appears that
I'm getting just a few frames of video every second. Video from MythTV
is very jerky and seems to 'tear' a bit.

7) Note that this doesn't seem to be nearly as bad when I configure
the machines to use the CRT output. I'm going to investigatge buying
some sort of VGA->S-Video or Composite video converter. That may work
better and not require all this crazy work.

   All in all, very disappointing. I understand the Gentoo devs had
their hands tied on a lot of this stuff but it's disappointing to have
working drivers get dropped from portage or the driver developers at
ATI not continue to move features forward. Or maybe it's still me and
my lack of real configuration knowledge.

Hope this helps,
Mark
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Re: [gentoo-user] ATI Mobility TV-OUT

[Grant]

> 7) Note that this doesn't seem to be nearly as bad when I configure
> the machines to use the CRT output. I'm going to investigatge buying
> some sort of VGA->S-Video or Composite video converter. That may work
> better and not require all this crazy work.

Check this out:

http://www.digitalconnection.com/Products/Video/9a60.asp

I'm going to get one of those.

- Grant
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Re: [gentoo-user] ATI Mobility TV-OUT

[Mark Knecht]

On 9/4/06, Grant <emailgrant@gmail.com> wrote:
> > 7) Note that this doesn't seem to be nearly as bad when I configure
> > the machines to use the CRT output. I'm going to investigatge buying
> > some sort of VGA->S-Video or Composite video converter. That may work
> > better and not require all this crazy work.
>
> Check this out:
>
> http://www.digitalconnection.com/Products/Video/9a60.asp
>
> I'm going to get one of those.
>
> - Grant

Yikes - At $129 it costs half of what this Myth frontend box ran me!
Too expensive for my application, but thanks.

NOTE: I used my machines last night and this morning with the 8.28.8
ati-driver. Tearing wasn't nearly as bad as with the 8.27 series.
However this driver also seems to be giving very low frame rates. Not
much fun to watch MythTV anymore. :-(

Cheers,
Mark
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Re: [gentoo-user] ATI Mobility TV-OUT

[Nick Rout]

On Mon, 2006-09-04 at 09:23 -0700, Mark Knecht wrote:
> On 9/4/06, Grant <emailgrant@gmail.com> wrote:
> > > 7) Note that this doesn't seem to be nearly as bad when I configure
> > > the machines to use the CRT output. I'm going to investigatge buying
> > > some sort of VGA->S-Video or Composite video converter. That may work
> > > better and not require all this crazy work.
> >
> > Check this out:
> >
> > http://www.digitalconnection.com/Products/Video/9a60.asp
> >
> > I'm going to get one of those.
> >
> > - Grant
> 
> Yikes - At $129 it costs half of what this Myth frontend box ran me!
> Too expensive for my application, but thanks.
> 
> NOTE: I used my machines last night and this morning with the 8.28.8
> ati-driver. Tearing wasn't nearly as bad as with the 8.27 series.
> However this driver also seems to be giving very low frame rates. Not
> much fun to watch MythTV anymore. :-(
> 
> Cheers,
> Mark

Frequent updating of myth machines is a mistake in my humble experience.
get it right, then stop!

For this reason i moved from gentoo to knoppmyth for my myth box. Never
been happier.

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Re: [gentoo-user] ATI Mobility TV-OUT

[Mark Knecht]

On 9/4/06, Nick Rout <nick@rout.co.nz> wrote:

>
> Frequent updating of myth machines is a mistake in my humble experience.
> get it right, then stop!
>
> For this reason i moved from gentoo to knoppmyth for my myth box. Never
> been happier.
>

Nick,
   Who said 'frequent'?

   I more or less agree, and I appreciate all your help in the past,
but this time your comment isn't directly helpful. (As a Gentoo user)
On the other hand it does serve to create some user-oriented
conversation so thanks for that.

   The 0.18 revision had bugs. The backend hung or shutdown Myth 3
time a week when the network got busy. (Just finished recording two
jobs, just start transcoding them, started recording two more and was
being accessed by a couple of frontend machines all at the same time.
This was almost guaranteed to cause the 0.18 backend to just
shutdown...)  The machines were running old kernels on old Gentoo
profiles. When the profiles and kernels get updated then you find that
the ati-drivers package doesn't work with the new kernel. Our Myth
backend machine is a Gentoo desktop serving double duty. That machine
needs to be updated, which then drives us to update the network, when
then causes us to have to update the frontends because the Myth devs
won't allow a 0.18 frontend to run with 0.19 backend. We we stuck.
Bummer.

   Again, I'm not really complaining. The network is up and running
again, but it is not as enjoyable as it used to be. While 0.19 is far
more stable than 0.18, the video on my ATI-based frontend machines is
really lousy to watch. No WAF or KAF at this time...

   I don't see how I Would have used KnoppMyth in this setup, but
maybe I could have tried it on a frontend-only machine, if it had
built in support for the ati-drivers I end up needing to get TV-out.

Thanks,
Mark
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Re: [gentoo-user] ATI Mobility TV-OUT

[Grant]

> Frequent updating of myth machines is a mistake in my humble experience.
> get it right, then stop!
>
> For this reason i moved from gentoo to knoppmyth for my myth box. Never
> been happier.

Are you saying don't update the mythtv package, or some of the other
packages as well?

- Grant
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Re: [gentoo-user] ATI Mobility TV-OUT

[Grant]

> > > 7) Note that this doesn't seem to be nearly as bad when I configure
> > > the machines to use the CRT output. I'm going to investigatge buying
> > > some sort of VGA->S-Video or Composite video converter. That may work
> > > better and not require all this crazy work.
> >
> > Check this out:
> >
> > http://www.digitalconnection.com/Products/Video/9a60.asp
> >
> > I'm going to get one of those.
> >
> > - Grant
>
> Yikes - At $129 it costs half of what this Myth frontend box ran me!
> Too expensive for my application, but thanks.

I'm a penny-pincher these days but I've decided to spring for this
thing.  I've done a side-by-side comparison and the image quality
through a component connection is *a lot* nicer than through an
s-video connection.  This is how I'll view DVDs, cable TV, and all the
UI stuff.  Plus, there is zero driver hassle.  It's $112 through the
link above.  The only thing better than this, as far as image quality,
would be a straight VGA connection to an HDTV.

- Grant
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Re: [gentoo-user] ATI Mobility TV-OUT

[Nick Rout]

On 10:53 am 09/06/06 Grant <emailgrant@gmail.com> wrote:
> >  Frequent updating of myth machines is a mistake in my humble
> >  experience. get it right, then stop!
> >
> >  For this reason i moved from gentoo to knoppmyth for my myth box.
> >  Never been happier.
>
> Are you saying don't update the mythtv package, or some of the other
> packages as well?
>
> - Grant

I am saying constant fiddling with a mythbox is counterproductive. Once you
have a stable system resist the tempation to update anything unless really
needed or wanted. I would of course update mythtv itself if there are
important bugs or desirable features, but a daily/weekly emerge --sync &&
emerge --update breaks more than it ever fixes on a box where stability is
paramount to family acceptance.

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Re: [gentoo-user] ATI Mobility TV-OUT

[Nick Rout]

On 11:03 am 09/06/06 Grant <emailgrant@gmail.com> wrote:
> > > >  7) Note that this doesn't seem to be nearly as bad when I
> > > >  configure the machines to use the CRT output. I'm going to
> > > >  investigatge buying some sort of VGA->S-Video or Composite
> > > >  video converter. That may work better and not require all this
> > > crazy work.
> > >  Check this out:
> > >
> > >  http://www.digitalconnection.com/Products/Video/9a60.asp
> > >
> > >  I'm going to get one of those.
> > >
> > >  - Grant
> >
> >  Yikes - At $129 it costs half of what this Myth frontend box ran
> >  me! Too expensive for my application, but thanks.
>
> I'm a penny-pincher these days but I've decided to spring for this
> thing.  I've done a side-by-side comparison and the image quality
> through a component connection is *a lot* nicer than through an
> s-video connection.  This is how I'll view DVDs, cable TV, and all the
> UI stuff.  Plus, there is zero driver hassle.  It's $112 through the
> link above.  The only thing better than this, as far as image quality,
> would be a straight VGA connection to an HDTV.
>
> - Grant
> --
> gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

I am very pleased to have bought a hi def flat screen LCD TV with a VGA
input connector. It works just  like a big monitor.

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Re: [gentoo-user] ATI Mobility TV-OUT

[Grant]

> Yikes - At $129 it costs half of what this Myth frontend box ran me!
> Too expensive for my application, but thanks.

I just wanted to mention that this place has the 9a60 for $105 with
free Priority Mail shipping (tax in PA):

http://mythic.tv

although they are out of stock at the moment so it doesn't show up in
their catalog.

- Grant
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Re: [gentoo-user] ATI Mobility TV-OUT

[Mark Knecht]

On 9/6/06, Grant <emailgrant@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Yikes - At $129 it costs half of what this Myth frontend box ran me!
> > Too expensive for my application, but thanks.
>
> I just wanted to mention that this place has the 9a60 for $105 with
> free Priority Mail shipping (tax in PA):
>
> http://mythic.tv
>
> although they are out of stock at the moment so it doesn't show up in
> their catalog.
>
> - Grant

Bein' that I ain't earning a penny right now I'm not trying new fun
stuff out very much. That said I hope you and others will report back
how this all works out.

Cheers,
Mark
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