[mythtv-users] Help -- why suddenly dramatically improved TV-out w/onboard GF4 MX ??
Joseph A. Caputo
jcaputo1 at comcast.net
Tue Jan 17 16:10:47 UTC 2006
...not that I'm complaining!
I've complained before on this list that the TV-out from my onboard GF4
MX 440 (Chaintech 7NIF2 mobo) was abysmal compared to my old (now dead)
LeadTek GF4 MX 420 AGP card. Until recently, I blamed it on the fact
that the mobo revision I got contained a new TV encoder chip (NV18)
compared to the NV17 chip that was on my old card and previous
revisions (like Jarod's, IIRC) of the Chaintech 7NIF2.
Well, apparently I was wrong.
A few months ago, I came home from work one day to find a stunningly
clear TV-out coming from my Myth box! I tried poking around, but
couldn't figure out why, and my wife accidently rebooted the box before
I could figure it out. After the reboot, my crappy TV-out was back.
But it got me thinking...
Several weeks later, it happened again, but this time I was able to
piece together what happened. It seems that my wife tends to reboot
the box sometimes because she can't remember which is the CD eject
button (granted, the pwr & reset buttons on the Antec Aria just *beg*
to be pressed, compared to the CD eject button which is, well... rather
plain... still, <rant>how could you *not* figure it out after the third
accidental reboot???</rant>
Anyway, what happend was this: I have my Myth setup going into a 3-way
A/V switch (with my DVD player & VCR). At this particular time, the
Myth box was rebooted while the switch was in the 'DVD' position; thus
the video hardware did not detect the TV connected... something about
that situation caused the TV-out to be crystal-clear.
Of course, the first thing I tried was to add "IgnoreEDID" "1" to my
xorg.conf, but that didn't help. So, started X both with and without
the TV connected, hoping to see some important differences... and the
only differences were that the last 10 lines of the logfile repeated.
That in itself is probably significant. So, for the "bad" TV-out, the
last 10 lines of Xorg.0.log are:
====================================================
(WW) Open APM failed (/dev/apm_bios) (No such file or directory)
(II) NVIDIA(0): Setting mode "800x600"
(II) Loading extension NV-GLX
(II) NVIDIA(0): NVIDIA 3D Acceleration Architecture Initialized
(II) NVIDIA(0): Using the NVIDIA 2D acceleration architecture
(II) NVIDIA(0): v4l[/dev/video0]: using hw video scaling [YUY2].
(==) RandR enabled
(II) Initializing extension GLX
(II) USB Mice: ps2EnableDataReporting: succeeded
Could not init font path element /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/CID/, removing
from list!
====================================================
For the "good" TV-out, those 10 lines are repeated *exactly* in the next
10 lines.
The funny thing is, it almost looks like for the "bad" TV-out, only one
video head is being properly initialized, while for the "good" TV-out,
both heads are being initialized (or the driver is just performing the
initialization twice). The thing is, I would have expected the TV-out
to *not* be initialized properly if it wasn't connected, but apparently
the opposite is happening. Weird. This is Nvidia driver 7174 on an
FC3 box, BTW.
So, my question is: can anyone help figure out exactly *why* this is
happening, and more importantly, how to fix it so that I don't have to
disconnect my TV every time X restarts on my Myth box in order to get a
good picture?
Here are the relevant lines from my xorg.conf:
====================================================
Section "Monitor"
Identifier "TV"
VendorName "Philips"
HorizSync 30.0 - 50.0
VertRefresh 59.94
DisplaySize 203 152
ModeLine "640x480NTSC" 28.195793 640 656 658 784 480 520 525
600
ModeLine "720x480NTSC" 27.5 720 744 800 872 480 483 485 525
ModeLine "800x600NTSC" 38.769241 800 812 814 880 600 646 649
735
EndSection
Section "Device"
Option "SWCursor" "0"
Identifier "Card0"
Driver "nvidia"
VendorName "NVidia"
BoardName "0x0172"
Option "HWCursor" "on"
Option "NoLogo" "on"
Option "NvAGP" "1"
Option "DigitalVibrance" "33"
Option "CursorShadow" "0"
Option "TwinView" "1"
Option "SecondMonitorHorizSync" "30-50"
Option "SecondMonitorVertRefresh" "60-60"
Option "TwinViewOrientation" "Clone"
Option "ConnectedMonitor" "tv"
Option "TVStandard" "NTSC-M"
Option "MetaModes" "800x600NTSC,800x600NTSC"
Option "TVOverScan" "0.7"
Option "DigitalVibrance" "50"
Option "IgnoreEDID" "1"
EndSection
Section "Screen"
Identifier "TV-0"
Device "Card0"
Monitor "TV"
DefaultDepth 24
SubSection "Display"
Modes "800x600NTSC" "720x480" "640x480" "400x300"
"320x240"
Depth 24
EndSubSection
EndSection
====================================================
If nothing else, at least maybe this will help someone else coax a good
TV-out picture from their board!
Thanks,
JAC
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