TV Out

If you are having trouble getting TV-Out functionality on a Radeon graphics card below Radeon 9500, the following instructions may help you. This method patches the open Xorg open source drivers with a tv-out patch from the GATOS project. These instructions have only been tested with Ubuntu Edgy.

Try these instructions if installing the proprietary drivers gives you a "high gamma" or "washed out" looking screen whenever the TV jack on card is in use at boot-time, or if your card is a Radeon with TV-Out that is not supported at all by the proprietary ATI drivers (fglrx).

Pre-Installation

Download Prerequisites

First, install driver and other needed packages. Copy/enter the following into the terminal.

  sudo apt-get install build-essential libdrm-dev mesa-common-dev \
  render-dev x11proto-core-dev x11proto-fonts-dev x11proto-gl-dev \
  x11proto-randr-dev x11proto-video-dev x11proto-xext-dev \
  x11proto-xf86dri-dev x11proto-xf86misc-dev x11proto-xinerama-dev \
  xserver-xorg-dev

Patching

Second, use wget in terminal to download the driver and patch

    mkdir ~/ati; cd ~/ati 
    wget http://megahurts.dk/rune/stuff/xorg7.1-6.6.3-tv_output.patch.gz  
    wget http://xorg.freedesktop.org/releases/individual/driver/xf86-video-ati-6.6.3.tar.bz2

• Note the above command is very wide, make sure you copy it all.

Next, patch the driver

    tar xjvf xf86-video-ati-6.6.3.tar.bz2 
    gunzip -c xorg7.1-6.6.3-tv_output.patch.gz | patch -p1 -d xf86-video-ati-6.6.3

Installation

Building

Next, configure, build and install the driver

 cd xf86-video-ati-6.6.3
 export XORG_PREFIX="/usr"
 export XORG_CONFIG="--prefix=$XORG_PREFIX --sysconfdir=/etc --localstatedir=/var"
 ./configure $XORG_CONFIG --with-xorg-module-dir=$XORG_PREFIX/lib/xorg/modules
 make
 sudo make install

• Note, using "sudo" will cause the terminal to ask for your password.

Configuration

Lastly, tweak xorg.conf by entering

    sudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf

and editing it with the following changes, note the specified lines:

 Section "Device"
    Identifier "<YOUR CARD NAME HERE>"
    Driver "ati"                #<---------Important line here
    BusID "PCI:1:0:0" 
    Option "TVOutput" "NTSC"    #<---------Important line here
 EndSection

 Section "Monitor" 
    Identifier "SyncMaster" 
    HorizSync 30 - 50           #<---------Important line here
    VertRefresh 60 - 60         #<---------Important line here
    Option "DPMS" 
 EndSection

 Section "Screen" 
    Identifier "Default Screen" 
    Device "<YOUR CARD NAME HERE>" 
    Monitor "SyncMaster" 
    DefaultDepth 24             #<---------Important line here
    SubSection "Display"        #<---------Important line here
         Depth 24               #<---------Important line here
         Modes "800x600"        #<---------Important line here
    EndSubSection               #<---------Important line here
 EndSection

After this point, check for any typos, and save the file.

Then press CTRL+ALT+Backspace to restart X. If all went well, you should come back up to the login screen and your TV-out should be working fine. If its not up at this point, but you do come back up to a login screen, try rebooting with the tv cable plugged in.

See Also

Thanks goes out to dlg from the ubuntu forums. Any problems or requests for modification should be directed to that thread.

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• Note, the cable to your TV should be plugged in when you boot up the PC.

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