Sunday, June 15, 2008

Nvidia/nv driver issues

Dear lazyweb,

In my pursuit for the ultimate media center, I have attached my desktop/server to my TV in the living room using S-Video. It was using the nvidia driver originally, but I was only getting black and white color. I figured I wouldn't be playing any games on it, so I switched it to the nv driver. That didn't fix it, that just made it worse. It was just "snow" (it looked like someone was playing an uber fast game of Galaga). After that, I tried the vesa driver, and everything works without a hitch (low res, but it works).

I haven't ever done a bug report for X11 or kernel-level drivers. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to go about doing this? What logs I need to look at and if it is indeed X11 or the kernel itself? Thanks in advance.

5 comments:

  1. Hi - I use the S-Video out of an Nvidia FX 5200 card using the nvidia driver. It now works fine, but I originally had a problem with only getting b&w. This was fixed by getting a better S-Video to SCART lead. Also there is usually only one scart socket on the tv that supports S-Video, so you need to use that one.

    With the default Nvidia driver in Hardy, (in my case anyway) it's already in colour. I just needed to get the TV hardware set up correctly.

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  2. Hi!

    It's likely that this is not a software issue at all but a known problem with svideo and scart.

    If you don't mind doing a very small amount of soldering I can recommend following the instructions on this page:
    http://www.camp0s.com/pc_related/svideo/how_to.php

    It worked like a charm for me earlier today :-)

    /JMB

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  3. Hi! If your svideo is going to a composite or scart plug you need:

    "Option" "TVOutFormat" "Composite"

    in the device section (I think) in your xorg.conf

    Hope this helps!

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  4. I had that too. But soldering is over the top to solve this. It's just a setting.

    It does not default to PAL-BE, which is the TV standard here. I'm not sure what your TV standard is, but likely it is not the default either.

    You need to change this manually in xorg.conf Even the nvidia-settings look does not allow you to change this setting.

    See:
    http://gentoo-wiki.com/TV-Out_with_GeForce

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