[MPlayer-users] Problems with tv out

[Malte Horst Arthur Skoruppa]

Hi,

I'm using MPlayer dev-CVS-031206-16:04-3.3 under SuSE Linux 8.2, and an ATI 
Radeon 9600 Pro (Sapphire Atlantis Pro) card. I have the official Linux 
drivers from www.ati.com, which actually include TV Out support (by the way, 
in the documentation it is said that ATI doesn't provide linux drivers with 
tv out support - well, they do, now), which means my XServer DOES support TV 
Out. I have configured it to use clone mode, so that everything I see on my 
monitor is also displayed on my TV -

...or almost everything. When I start a movie, I can see everything but the 
actual movie. The window inside which the movie should be displayed just 
stays black on the TV screen. It is displayed on my monitor, though.

The same thing happens when I make a screenshot, thus I uploaded one so you 
can get an idea:
http://hetzner.scummunity.de/~malte/screenshots/mplayerscreen2.jpg

That's sad, because movies are more or less the one most important thing I 
need my tv out for.

I have read the documentation, searched through Google etc. but I couldn't 
find an answer to my problem. All I found is that it probably has something 
to do with "video overlay" (does this mean that mplayer communicates directly 
with the graphics card instead of the XServer, for perfomance reasons?). I 
think it is enabled and I need it disabled. Is this possible with mplayer? 
The only thing I found in the documentation is "-dxr2 nooverlay", but 
unfortunately I do not have a DXR2 card. Can't I disable the video overlay 
with my normal graphics card?

I found out that by using the 'x11' driver instead of the 'xv' driver (the 
latter one was the one which mplayer used by default), my tv out worked, i.e. 
the movie was also displayed on the tv screen. But wait! When switching to 
fullscreen with this driver, the size of the image is not fitted to the 
screen size. I.e. I have a resolution of 1280x1024 (and a virtual screen of 
1024x768 on my TV, guess I'll need to change my computer monitor resolution 
to 1024x768 when watching a movie, but that's another story), and with a 
movie with a resolution of 512x384 it's only a tiny little thing in the 
center of the screen. Yes, I *could* change my screen resolution to 640x480, 
but there'd still be black borders which I don't want. I want it to fit 
*perfectly* (excepted, perhaps, black borders at the top and the bottom or at 
the left and the right for some movie which is not 4:3).

As for the other drivers, they didn't work perfectly either. vidix says 
"vosub_vidix: Couldn't find working VIDIX driver", gl and gl2 work, but are 
WAY too slow, fbdev says "Can't open /dev/fb0: no such device", vesa doesn't 
display anyting on tv at all, vesa:vidix, fbdev:vidix and xvidix say the same 
thing as vidix, etc...

Long story, short question - any suggestions? ;-)

It works with the Windows Media Player under Windows, but using Linux as my 
primary system, I really don't feel much like rebooting every time I want to 
watch a movie ;-) And if the Windows Media Player can do it, the Movie Player 
for Linux can do it left-handed and eyes closed, can't he? ;-)

Thanks,

Malte

-- 
Malte Skoruppa
Linux User #289680