Anyone had luck with TV-Out & X.1?

Fahrvergnuugen

I am the law!
I have a PCI Radeon card with TV-Out. It would be really nice to be able to watch DVDs on the 35" TV :)

I don't think that ATI has released X drivers for the Radeon. The drivers were written by apple to support all of the G4 owners out there who bought their G4 with a radeon in it. I don't think these cards had TV-Out so I think Apple ignored this feature when they wrote the driver.

Does anyone know otherwise? I hope ATI will produce their own set of drivers soon....
 
Actually ATI does officially support TV out in Mac OS X. The instructions say to simply say to plug it all in and boot up. Then open the Displays preference panel and supposedly it will list resolutions such as "800x600 (simulscan)". All you do is click the simulscan ones and then it's SUPPOSED to show up on the TV. Well TV-out on my PCI Radeon didn't even work in OS 9, so I wasn't very hopeful when I read these instructions on their site. If it DOES work for you, let me know. I'd love to get it working on mine, but for now I think I just have a picky card or something.

- Trey
 
Well that's very interesting news. Can you give me a link? I'll try it out. I have 3 video cards in my computer, so I'm not sure if that has something to do with it. Maybe if I boot with just one monitor plugged into the radeon and the TV out hooked up?
 
Not sure that OSX DVD player supports it yet. It doesn't support the S-Video out on my TiBook....
 
How can OSX support TV-Out and not the DVD player?

On my powerbook I used to hook up the S-Video out, put it to sleep, wake it up and the TV would be like a second monitor. Then all I had to do was drag the DVD viewer onto that screen.

Did you mean to say that OSX doesn't support your TiBook's TV-Out yet?
 
I need to know too. I plan to hopefully soon buy an AGP video card for my dual G4 that has video out so i can use QT. What i want to do is in 10.1 load up mpeg movies and play using quicktime and do present movie and full screen and record on vcr. also i want to play back apple quicktime keynote speeches and record them.

So i need a video card or some way to get video out and it work just like in mac os 9.
 
I can play a DVD on either of my monitors, but only if my menu bar is on the one that I want to watch the movie on ... and the simul display resolutions are natively supported under X.x it has been sweet like that for a while.

Issue: sleeping may not be enough. You may need to actually restart your machine with the new wiring config for it to recognize stuff. Sleep is not quite as deep under OS X as it was under OS 9, which is part of the reason that it's so fast.
 
Does that mean that you got your TV-Out to work under X?

When I was talking about sleeping, I was refering to my Lombard Powerbook in OS9 [I forgot to specify this]. I was just trying to explain the old method of getting a DVD to play on a TV. They don't have DVD support for this model yet as I'm told...I no longer have the machine so I can't test it to see if TV out or if the DVD player works.
 
In fact I go out to a VCR, the VCR puts out coax RF on channel 3, I pump that through a cable amp, and out to another VCR, and 2 TV's over varying distances. My monitor is always on simul.

My powerbook G3 233 didn't recognize the simul out options unedr X.0.0 unless I booted it with connections. I have no other tests to see if they've changed this.
 
Well, that means that the ATI driver for the *books supports the TV-Out. I wonder about the Desktops now... I can't seem to get my PCI Radeon's TV-Out to work at all...but there are so many combinations of things I could try...
Thanks for the info.
 
DVD Player in OS X.1 will not work with TV-Out or dual monitors. It's a bug in the player that I think it causes an error with "Your system is not supported". So, in essence, you can't use it until they fix it. As for the rest, can't help with a Radeon.
 
I'm not sure I was clear on what I had. I haven't done simul on a laptop with this OS revision. On my desktop with dual monitors and one of them simul to TV I can do anything I want including DVD (if I'm willing to move the menu bar)

Radeon stock and ATI XClaimVR128
 
I have been able to play a DVD on another screen with my Pismo 500 (didn't try the TV through s-video yet though). The trick is to lower the resolution of the other screen to 640 x 480 and to 256 colors.

Colddiver
 
It doesn't work yet, and will be fixed in a software update soon.

see knowledge base article 60895If you've managed to convince vyou rmachine that it does, then give yourself a pat on the back!
 
That only says you can output to a TV - the problem is , I think, whether the DVD player will support having the second monitor active.

Let us know how you get on.
 
Got it working!
I hooked up the TV and a monitor to the PCI Radeon. I also had my secndary montior hooked to the AGP Rage 128 Pro. I rebooted and then selected 640x480 simulscan from the monitors control panel. The two radeon screens mirrored. I made the radeon my primary display and played a DVD.

I'm really happy this works...I only have one complaint. I wish you could get the TV to appear as a third monitor, rather than a mirror of the primary display. For this to work, the DVD player would have to let you drag the Viewer onto a secondary screen....whereas right now, it won't let me drag the viewer onto the AGP Rage Pro screen.

At 640x480 your primary desktop gets really cramped...but at least it works! :)
 
the 3rd screen issue is one of hardware, not software. Talk to ATI or get another video card.

That's a bummer that 640x480 is your anly choice, I do 800x600.
 
I tried it on a TV (using s-video out) with my pismo 500... DVD 0player launched (providing that the resolution was brought down to 640x480 8-bit on my LCD) but all I got on the TV screen was the green screen. The DVD seemed to play (I had sound) but no image.

I will have to investigate this further...

Colddiver
 
If I tell my two monitors to mirror, I get one with a green screen and one with DVD. This is because the green screen is provided for the DVD player to write to, but the DVD player writes directly to the screen, not to the high level double buffered Aqua stuff.

The Pismo I believe is capable of mirroring the monitor. So if you want it out to the TV, you may need to make the TV a separate screen and put your menu bar on it. There may also be the limited VRAM issue where you need to minimize the footprint of your screen in VRAM before the DVD player has enough room to think. That means 640x480 and less than full color. Mind you I'm flying kinda blind here, I don't have a Pismo. That's my take on this issue.
 
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