Radeon TV-Out

In 2007 Alex Deucher added preliminary TV-Out-support based on the gatos-code to the randr12-branch of the ati-driver. The branch has now been merged to the git HEAD of xf86-video-ati.

Driver Releases

Starting from the 6.7.191 pre-release the X.org ati driver supports TV-Out on selected cards. That means stable version 6.8.0 and newer have the support. A new enough driver is also included starting in eg. Fedora 8 and Ubuntu 7.10.

How to build

See RadeonTVbuildHowto.

How to use

You can enable TV-Out either dynamically (by issuing commands to the running X server) or statically (through the xorg.config file, before starting the X server). For testing, the dynamic method is probably easier.

How to use: R5xx / R6xx / R7xx

Newer R600 / R700 series cards (Radeon HD X2000 - X4870) need this option in xorg.conf:

  • Option "ATOMTvOut" "TRUE"
    The same Option can be applied to R5xx cards too (or at least some of that series). It has been checked to work on x1650 (RV530LE) - this line really needed to detect S-Video tv-out.

Enabling TV-Out Dynamically

TV-out may be enabled by using a recent driver and xrandr utility:

  1. xrandr --addmode S-video 800x600
  2. xrandr --output S-video --mode 800x600
  3. xrandr --output S-video --set "tv standard" ntsc

Enabling TV-Out Statically

Several options need to be specified. See the radeon(4) manpage for a description. In particular, you must set "TVStandard" to match your flavour of video.

This recipe is not definitive, but it has worked.

In the "Device" section:

  •        Driver  "radeon"
       Option "TVDACLoadDetect" "TRUE"
       Option "TVStandard" "ntsc"
       Option "monitor-S-video" "TV-monitor"

    In the "Monitor" Section:

  •        Option  "PreferredMode"  "800x600"

    In the "Screen" section:

  •         DefaultDepth  24
        SubSection "Display"
                Depth          24
                Modes         "800x600"
        EndSubSection

History

How we got here from the GATOS Patch

There was a very old effort by the gatos-project to support TV Out on ATI Radeons. It was GPL-licensed in the past, but in 2007 all authors agreed with relicensing under MIT-license, so that it was brought to a xf86-video-ati's branch and later on merged to the main driver.

randr-1.2 branch of xf86-video-ati

arklinux-patch (latest)

Gentoo bug with updated patch

Update to below patch by Wei-Tsun Sun

Patch up to xorg 7.0 by Rune Petersen

Original gatos code

Relicensing

Frederico Ulivi (original author) agreed to relicense the code under a MIT-license (which allows inclusion in the xorg-driver)

All others agreed to the relicensing

atitvout

On some older cards the tv out can be enabled with atitvout, which is not developed anymore:

atitvout by Lennart Poettering