Mailing List Archive

some things with nvidia cards
ok, on some information i just got from issac, i made some changes to my
nvidia geforce2 mx setup and have improved my video out a bit, i thought
i'd pass it along.

many people had suggested to me to use the TwinView option in the driver
section of the xf86config-4 file. this worked well, and allowed me to
have the monitor and the tv going while getting things ready. but i
found out that overlays are disabled when in twinview mode. this showed
up by running xvinfo, and only seeing an adaptor line like this:

Adaptor #0: "NV05 Video Blitter"

issac informed me that the Blitter thing doesn't wait for the vsync,
which neatly explained some image tearing i was seeing (and not happy
with). modifying the xf86config-4 to not enable twinview mode, i now
saw two adaptors:

Adaptor #0: "NV10 Video Overlay"
Adaptor #1: "NV05 Video Blitter"

and lo-and-behold, no tearing.

wonderful i thought. but then i noticed something else. once i brought
everything up in 800x600 mode and used nvtv to set the 800x600 huge (the
only way i can almost fill the width of my pioneer tv) i got the dreaded
interlacing-looking-crap (where every 4th or so line looks pulled to the
left), which i believe it was decided it was an xv bug. i had been
running in this mode fine before disabling the twinview (and therefore
enabling the video overlay stuff). changing everything to 640x480 and
using nvtv to set 640x480 huge solved that problem nicely, now i have a
full screen and no tearing.

so, if anyone has tearing problems, try disabling the twinview options.
and if anyone is having that xv problem pulling some pixel lines out of
alignment, try cutting back to 640x480 perhaps and/or stop using nvtv to
overscan.

anyway, this is a little longer than i wanted, but hopefully the
explanation and the steps might help someone else if they search this
off of the archives.

cheers,

CraigL->Thx();
Re: some things with nvidia cards [ In reply to ]
Hehe funny you should bring this up, I've been playing with my NV setup
tonight, haven't tried what you have done yet, but this is what I have
(Dev Setup):

GeForce 4 MX 420 w/ TV Out..

The Setup:

21 Inch Monitor for programming etc running in 24bit 1600x1200 and down
14 Inch TV for MythTV running in 16bit 800x600 and 640x480

Independent Screens so Video Overlay, GL etc work on the second head.

The only issues I have at the moment are that the TV must have had the
focus to be able to do anything, I suspect once I set up my remote and
fire it up from the TV screen it will send the events to the current
window only on that screen (not sure about that though)

The other issue is that you must be logged in to the Monitor to make it
work (They share a xdm), I'm not sure if I can work around this or not.


How to Achieve (RTFM):

Seriously though, these are the relevant bits of my XF86Config file:

Section "Monitor"
Identifier "Monitor1"
HorizSync 30-50
VertRefresh 60
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
Identifier "Monitor0"
HorizSync 30-97
VertRefresh 48-180
EndSection

Section "Device"
Identifier "NVCRT"
VendorName "nvidia"
Driver "nvidia"
BusID "PCI:01:00:0"
Screen 0
Option "NoLogo" "1"
Option "UseEdidFreqs" "1"
EndSection

Section "Device"
Identifier "NVTV"
VendorName "nvidia"
Driver "nvidia"
BusID "PCI:01:00:0"
Screen 1
Option "ConnectMonitor" "tv"
Option "TVStandard" "PAL-B"
Option "TVOutFormat" "COMPOSITE"
Option "NoLogo" "1"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
Identifier "Screen0"
Device "NVCRT"
Monitor "Monitor0"
DefaultDepth 24

Subsection "Display"
Depth 24
Modes "1600x1200" "1280x1024" "1024x768" "800x600"
"640x480"
ViewPort 0 0
EndSubsection
EndSection

Section "Screen"
Identifier "Screen1"
Device "NVTV"
Monitor "Monitor1"
DefaultDepth 16

Subsection "Display"
Depth 16
Modes "800x600" "640x480"
ViewPort 0 0
EndSubsection
EndSection

Section "ServerLayout"
Identifier "Server Layout"
Screen 0 "Screen0"
Screen 1 "Screen1" leftOf "Screen0"
InputDevice "Mouse1" "CorePointer"
InputDevice "Keyboard1" "CoreKeyboard"
EndSection

:D
RE: some things with nvidia cards [ In reply to ]
> -----Original Message-----
> From: mythtv-users-bounces@snowman.net
> [mailto:mythtv-users-bounces@snowman.net]On Behalf Of Drew Whittle
> Sent: Thursday, May 22, 2003 8:46 AM
> To: Discussion about mythtv
> Subject: Re: [mythtv-users] some things with nvidia cards
>
>
> Hehe funny you should bring this up, I've been playing with my NV setup
> tonight, haven't tried what you have done yet, but this is what I have
> (Dev Setup):
>
> GeForce 4 MX 420 w/ TV Out..
>

FYI, AFAIK you can't use nvtv to tweak the overscan/underscan on the GF4 MX
cards, as they use an Nvidia TV encoder chip instead of the Philips one in
the GF2.

-JAC