[MPlayer-users] ATI Rage Mobility M3 TV-Out finally working.

[Troy D. Strum]

Hi folks.

I have a Rage Mobility M3 8meg and I've managed to get my S-Video cable
working from my laptop after a lot of struggling. Turns out it was easier
(in the end) than I had expected. I had read thru all the MPlayer
documentation, GATOS, rage128_vid info, vesa, and everything else I could
find - but this guy finally provided the trick:

http://www.stud.uni-hamburg.de/users/lennart/projects/atitvout/

It turns out that on my laptop simply plugging in the cable won't actually
activate it, even on boot. With this program (using the "-f" switch to force
for my card) I can tell the card to shift output to the cable:

./atitvout -f t
(t = television, read his README for other stuff it does as well. This does
not appear to be related to the GATOS project despite the name.)

I can drive the s-video all the way from 640x480 to 1024x768. Using "-vo
vesa" allows me to watch movies under X without switching resolutions - I
just tell the vesa driver what size and bpp to use and it works great. This
is good for me because X is running at 1400x1050 and that's not a supported
output resolution. Linux framebuffer consoles also work, BTW, and I suspect
text mode migth work as well.

You can enable the TV out even if you're not currently in a supported
resolution - but when the movie plays in vesa mode the TV-out will
automatically kick in and the display will shift from the LCD to the TV and
back again when you exit.

This works for me:

"mplayer -vo vesa:dga -double -fs -zoom -screenw 640 -screenh 480 -bpp
16 -dvd 1"
(You might not need to specify everything I specified.)

Macrovision does _not_ appear to "be an issue," but I may be wrong - I only
have so much stuff that I can hook up with s-video to test.

PROBLEMS: (not big)

1. You can only (on my card) drive the LCD/CRT *or* the TV out.
(documented in his README for atitvout)
2. Coming back to X causes a jumbled display. I use ALT+CTRL+F1 then ALT+F7
to fix it back up.
(documented in the MPlayer docs in the VESA section)

I hope this helps someone. If that someone is not you, I'm sorry for wasting
your time. YMMV.

Cheers.


- Troy