Mr Guy's Journal: ATI Radeon 7000 and Linux

I've tried asking this a few other places without much luck and tried searching for the answer, can anyone help?

I'm trying to make a tv front end with an ATI Radeon 7000 card. I tried used the config file from http://freevo.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/moin.cgi/Radeon7000Page among others.

The issue I'm having is that gibberish comes up on the TV screen. It's kinda hard to describe which is why I'm not sure how to look for a better answer. It's like the screen has been divided into horizontal strips and layed back down on a diagonal. The colors look sorta right, and I can pick out some features on the screen, but there are these diagonal blocky bars fuzzing up the screen. The best description I can come up with is that it's like a houndstooth pattern has been put over top of a faded view of what my screen should look like.
It's driving me nuts, and it's the last thing I need to figure out to get my dedicated mythfrontend built out of spare parts.

ati7000

[rjelks]

This may not be helpful, but I've never been able to get any ATI TV cards working properly under Linux. I know this isn't what you were looking for, but have you considered Windows? www.myhtpc.net [myhtpc.net] isn't a bad free project. They sell a newer, kind of cool program, but if you look, the old version is free. Another alternative is finding a cheap Nvidia card on ebay.

Works for me with FreeBSD and Linux

[flynn_nrg]

At first I looked at the ati-tvout program (I was using gentoo back then). Then, when I moved back to FreeBSD I discovered that all I needed was to boot with the video cable connected to the TV (so the ATI BIOS would setup the tv-out modes) and a X config file that uses the VESA driver, with a limit of 60Hz for vertical refresh. When I want to use my computer i just startx, if I want to watch a movie I use the other config file and, voila! mplayer can still use the xvidix hardware acceleration, so movie rep

Re:Works for me with FreeBSD and Linux

[Mr Guy]

I'll definitely give this snippet a shot. The problem I'm having is so odd that I'm tempted to post a picture of it. It's the only monitor I have for that computer, since I just want it to be a frontend for watching TV.

I have the monitor set at 30-50 horizontal and 60 vertical already, but I'll give the vesa thing a go.

Re:Works for me with FreeBSD and Linux

[Mr Guy]

I love you, but not in a gay way. Worked great, even though I haven't tried tv playback on it yet.

Re:Works for me with FreeBSD and Linux

[skids]

I did a similar thing... I ran Radeonfb but hacked the kernel code to disable all programming of the timing registers, because the kernel code doesn't know how to sync the TVout-specific registers to the programmed video mode. That's why you get the strange diagonal lines etc.

This of course restricts me to always running in 640x resolution, but I really only want to play videos on it so that was enough to get basic fb-based vlc working for the most part. I did try twiddling around with the TV-out registe

Does XV work for you in your setup?

[Mr Guy]

I'm not getting XV to work, does it for you?

Re:Does XV work for you in your setup?

[flynn_nrg]

No, Xv doesn't work with plain jane vesa driver. You have to use mplayer with the xividx driver to get hardware accel.

Re:Does XV work for you in your setup?

[Mr Guy]

Doh, that'll explain why MythTv can't get xv to work. Oh well, I guess I'll have to see what I can do about the gatos drivers.

GATOS

[Jebediah21]

Have you taken a look at http://gatos.sf.net/ [sf.net] yet? The mailing list is especially helpful for TV out related stuff. Search the archived posts.

Re:GATOS

[Mr Guy]

I was a little concerned with gatos because the documentation seems to indicate they don't support recent versions of XFree, but just today I noticed they DO have 4.3.0 listed on the downloads page so I may give it a shot tonight.

Re:GATOS

[Jebediah21]

Cool :) I believe you need the CVS branch checked out for TV Out. I've never messed with TV out so I don't know exactly. If you can't find the answer on the webpages search the mailinglist and if you can't find anything post to the list and you should get an answer from somebody.

Same here had to use Vesa

[Stonent1]

Basically the same thing using my Radeon M6 (same core as the r7000) in my laptop. Any attempts at using the radeon driver just causes garbage and rolling I have to use Vesa which is extremely slow. (I wanted to play mame or nintendo games on the tv) but the performance is terrible.