[ltp] RE: svideo output on thinkpad z61e

[Bryan Moore]

On Sun, 10 Aug 2008 23:33:28 +0100
Richard Neill <rn214@hermes.cam.ac.uk> wrote:

> 
> 
> Bryan Moore wrote:
> > i'm sending this to both mailing lists because, frankly, i'm not
> > sure to which it belongs.
> > 
> > i've followed the following pages' directions and have successfully
> > "turned-on" my svideo out to the television:
> >    http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Intel_Graphics_Media_Accelerator_950
> >    http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Sample_Fn-F7_script
> >    http://www.intellinuxgraphics.org/dualhead.html
> > 
> > one catch: it's in black and white. okay, well, two catches: it's in
> > black and white and not the resolution i set-up in xorg.conf. i
> > don't care too much about the resolution issue if i can get it in
> > color... any ideas?
> 
> Quite often, TVs set to the wrong region will partly cope with the 
> signal, but you get it in a degraded manner, often failing to black
> and white. Are you sure you have PAL/NTSC/SECAM set correctly on both
> the output, and the TV?
> 
> Also, when you talk about "the" resolution, you probably have to go
> with whatever is native for the TV - note that there are (at least) 3
> other possible gotchas:
>    - under/overscan
>    - widescreen vs 4:3
>    - TV "pixels" aren't square.
>        Eg PAL contains 576 lines x 720 cols, BUT on a PC, you need to
>        display this as 576 x 768, since TV pixels are a bit wider than
>       they are high, and otherwise you get noticeable distortion.
>      Mplayer and friends *sometimes*  auto-correct this for you, and
>      sometimes they don't!
> 
> Richard
> 
> 
> 
> P.S. If you've not done this before, you'll notice horrible 
> "comb-distortion" aka "mice teeth". This is related to 
> interlacing/de-interlacing. http://100fps.com/

my television doesn't have an option to change it's region, so i'm
going to assume--possibly incorrectly--that it is set correctly. one
down, many to go.

under-/overscan? what do you mean?

the widescreen is a likely culprit, as my lcd IS widescreen and my
television is not.

i don't want to get into a "why can windows do it and linux can't," but
this would seem like something relatively straight forward... if
windows can do this seamlessly and intel has native drivers for linux,
why can't linux achieve the same thing?

overall, any suggestions on how i could proceed?