TVandExternalVGA

TVandExternalVGA

Status

Introduction

Full support for TV in/out and external VGA/DVI (on laptop) functionality of video cards.

Rationale

Users should be able to utilize their computer to the fullest: this includes external video out (VGA/DVI/TV) on laptops. Sometimes this requires proprietary drivers (all TV out, currently), but VGA out can typically be handled with open source drivers for laptops. Unfortunately this is a very difficult problem to solve. As X does not have the concept of hotplug displays/screens, setting up VGA out (e.g.) would require burning up the battery on laptops. There are several small card-specific tools to poke registers to make this happen (atitvout, radeontool, i810switch, i855crt, et al), but these are wildly card-specific, and horrendously nasty hacks.

Scope and Use Cases

xorg configuration and xorg itself.

Implementation Plan

Ideally, X.Org should work out of the box, and deal with the keypress events. However, this is not even close to the status quo.

We can get ACPI events from most video switching keypress events, so we can use this to invoke a script that works out what hardware the user is running, and kicks the appropriate userspace tool. Currently we have switching worked out for all Radeons (should mostly work), and all Intel chipsets. nVidia is still a black hole at this point.

We cannot enable VGA out by default; it sucks up too much power on laptops to be usable.

Data Preservation and Migration

None.

Packages Affected

  • xorg

  • acpi-support

User Interface Requirements

Have the video-switching hotkey on laptops behave as expected.

Outstanding Issues

Right now, it doesn't.

Suggestions / Comments

  • Most common ati graphics cards from 7000 to 9250 have TV-out. These work using the GATOS driver, which is (very slowly) being merged in to xorg proper. Could Ubuntu help with this? (See: gatos.sourceforge.net) -- MikkoVirkkilä

    • GATOS also now has preliminary support for RT200 chips, which should deal with TV out on most higher-end ATI cards in the r3xx/r4xx series. Unfortunately the coding style is wildly different, and there are a few other weirdnesses that make it require more time than packagers can dedicate to upstream. -- DanielStone

  • For support for the hollywood+/dxr3 chipset, see: https://bugzilla.ubuntu.com/show_bug.cgi?id=10543

  • Many Geforce cards are supported by nvtv (a user space program) http://sourceforge.net/projects/nv-tv-out/ (To my knowledge the author of that project made some comments to the former Xouvert project that integrating nvtv in X would not be very hard). (copy pasted from IdeaPool)

  • Check work done in http://geexbox.org/en/index.html. Geexbox is a media player using linux & mplayer. It has some support for tv-out.

UbuntuDownUnder/BOFs/TVandExternalVGA (last edited 2008-08-06 16:23:31 by localhost)