I am going to transfer my Home Theater PC from Windows XP to Linux. I have a 7600GT Nvidia card. How are the drivers/control panel for watching movies on TV out? Right now I only have standard definition movies that I watch off my hard drive through the TV out to my standard definition CRT TV. Will I loose anything by switching to the Linux Nvidia drivers for watching movies?
Announcement
Collapse
No announcement yet.
Movie Watching- How are the Nvidia drivers for this?
Collapse
X
-
That's great to hear! There is one thing I am terrified of though. I use a standard definition tv. In Windows XP, I have to use one of the very first drivers released for my 7600Gt. If I use any driver after that, there is a bug where any movie that is 16:9 played on a standard TV will be stretched. This link explains it all: http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?s...c=17158&st=260
There is no way around this problem. Nivida never bothered to fix this bug because I guess there are not enough people using SD tv's.
What I am scared of is that this problem will also exist in the latest Linux Nvidia driver. I know because of kernel updates and configs there's no way an older linux nvidia driver would work. So, I am scared that this problem will exist in the Linux Nvidia drivers as well and I'll be stuck with it. Do you know off hand if this problem exists in the Linux drivers(seems to be only for SD Tvs)?
Comment
-
The nv driver doesn't support svideo tvout though... does it? If it did (and also didn't lock up X on log out all the time) I might actually use it.
When I was rocking an AGP 6600gt, I had mostly functional tvout(picture was not centered at all and no options for position) with Nvidia's driver. There's an xorg.conf option (and one for nvidia-settings) for adjusting the level of over/underscan. I suspect these options will work fine on a 7xxx series card, but on my new 8600gt (and other netizen's 8xxx series cards) these options have zero effect. The only explanation I've found on nvnews basically says "that's the way the tv-encoder works, we're never doing anything about this, it's not our problem." Oh yeah and the reason I care about having this option is because WAY too much of the picture is off the edges of my TV (the default with my old card was the picture didn't come close to the edges).
ATI's driver has tvout size and position controls, just like anyone with SENSE knows should be included.
So to actually answer your question - probably any tvout position controls you have in windows (they were there for me with my 6600gt, but not my 8600gt) won't be present on Linux, but the overscan/size settings should be available, and generally tvout works well apart from the caveat(s) I've mentioned.
Comment
-
Originally posted by dman777 View PostThat's great to hear! There is one thing I am terrified of though. I use a standard definition tv. In Windows XP, I have to use one of the very first drivers released for my 7600Gt. If I use any driver after that, there is a bug where any movie that is 16:9 played on a standard TV will be stretched. This link explains it all: http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?s...c=17158&st=260
There is no way around this problem. Nivida never bothered to fix this bug because I guess there are not enough people using SD tv's.
What I am scared of is that this problem will also exist in the latest Linux Nvidia driver. I know because of kernel updates and configs there's no way an older linux nvidia driver would work. So, I am scared that this problem will exist in the Linux Nvidia drivers as well and I'll be stuck with it. Do you know off hand if this problem exists in the Linux drivers(seems to be only for SD Tvs)?
Comment
-
Comment