Configuring X for use with Television on Nvidia

bleichmittel · 2009-06-02 21:56:46

Hi there!

I on a nVidia GeForce 8500 GT with TV-Out. I would like to use my old CRT-Mitsubishi-TV to watch Movies on it. What I did was buying a connector from S-Video to Cinch (this one to be exactly: http://www.reichelt.de/?;ARTICLE=57611, then I plugged a long cinch cabel into it and connected it to the Television with a SCART-Converter.

I 'm perfectly able to get a picture onto my TV with TwinView configured. A configuration with to seperate screens didn't work (probably because of KDE4). The only problem I have is, that there is always some space cut off. If I put a window into fullscreen there is always some space I can't see (on all 4 sides). That's a little annoying. Does anyone have a clue what the problem could be?

I already played around with some settings (different resolutions, composite/s-video, different tv-standards, etc.), but nothing really helped. All modes that worked more or less had cut-off areas. As I only want to play movies (usually with vlc) I would be fine with any other solution, that makes the vlc full-screen-view fit into the TV.

Here are the important parts of my xorg.conf (please don't care too much for the actual modeline, as I said I tried many different resolutions for the TV):

Section "ServerLayout"
    Identifier     "X.org Configured"
    Screen      0  "Screen[0]" 0 0
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
    Identifier     "Monitor[0]"
    VendorName     "Philips"
    ModelName      "Brilliance 190BW"
    HorizSync        30.0 - 83.0
    VertRefresh        56.0 - 75.0
    Option       "DPMS" "True"
EndSection

Section "Device"
    Identifier     "Card[0]"
    Driver         "nvidia"
    VendorName     "nVidia Corporation"
    BoardName      "GeForce 8500 GT"
    Option       "ConnectedMonitor" "DFP,TV"
    Option       "NoLogo" "True"
    Option       "RenderAccel" "True"
    Option       "TripleBuffer" "True"
    Option       "TVStandard" "PAL-B"
    Option       "TVOutFormat" "SVIDEO"
    Option       "MetaModes" "DFP: 1680x1050,TV: NULL; DFP: 800x600,TV: 800x600"
    Option    "TwinView"
    Option    "TwinViewOrientation"      "LeftOf"
    Option    "SecondMonitorHorizSync"   "30-50"
    Option    "SecondMonitorVertRefresh" "60"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
    Identifier     "Screen[0]"
    Device         "Card[0]"
    Monitor        "Monitor[0]"
    DefaultDepth   24
    SubSection     "Display"
        Viewport    0 0
        Depth       24
    Modes        "1680x1050" "1440x1024" "1440x900" "1280x1024" "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"
    EndSubSection
EndSection

Last edited by bleichmittel (2009-06-02 22:01:40)

stefanwilkens · 2009-06-02 23:06:47

mis-read your post, sorry.

I'm assuming you've tried nvidia's tools for this, so have you looked into xrandr? It provides a non config userspace way to set-up multy display and provides scaling, I think that may help you here.

man xrandr for more information

Last edited by stefanwilkens (2009-06-02 23:21:35)

karol · 2009-06-02 23:19:37

If both f.e. "800x600" and "640x480" result in some cut-off areas I have no idea what could that be. You wrote that you've already tried different TV-standards so there's not much I can think of apart from:
- digging into nvidia docs wrt TwinView,
- rescaling your movies, adding a border around the frame to compensate for the cut-off (if it is regular and constant).

bleichmittel · 2009-06-03 15:05:41

stefanwilkens wrote:

mis-read your post, sorry.
I'm assuming you've tried nvidia's tools for this, so have you looked into xrandr? It provides a non config userspace way to set-up multy display and provides scaling, I think that may help you here.
man xrandr for more information

I used the posted xorg.conf with xrandr (i. e. "xrandr -r 50 -s 1680x1050" to switch to the monitor only modeline etc.), i also played around with "NVidia X-Server Settings", but with no success.
I already used this television with an Intel-Graphics-Card, xrandr was more useful back then. I for example used this script to switch to dual-view:

#!/bin/sh
xrandr --auto
xrandr --output LVDS --mode 800x600
xrandr --output TV --same-as LVDS
xrandr --output TV --set TV_FORMAT PAL
xrandr --output TV --mode 800x600

I believe this has worked fine. So it probably is the fault of the Nvidia-Card or the S-Video-To-Cinch-Connector (which I hadn't used before). Or it is because of bad configuration.

karol wrote:

- rescaling your movies, adding a border around the frame to compensate for the cut-off (if it is regular and constant).

Yes, I tried different resolutions. To me the cut-off areas seemed to always be the same. I'll go on with resizing the VLC-X-Video-output-Window to fit. Is there an easy way to do this (or cut off certain areas in an comfortable way with vlc)? Of course I would also love to hear further ideas on what I could do about this issue.

karol · 2009-06-03 15:22:47

http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php? … 25#p563325 - a similar problem.

Arch Linux

#1 2009-06-02 21:56:46

Configuring X for use with Television on Nvidia

#2 2009-06-02 23:06:47

Re: Configuring X for use with Television on Nvidia

#3 2009-06-02 23:19:37

Re: Configuring X for use with Television on Nvidia

#4 2009-06-03 15:05:41

Re: Configuring X for use with Television on Nvidia

#5 2009-06-03 15:22:47

Re: Configuring X for use with Television on Nvidia

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