G400Max + DivX + TVOut probs.

[Variant]

I'm posting this from the matrox.com forums since they are 'closed' on the weekends (odd). Apologies for it being a bit site-specific. Hope someone can help!

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I'm having some similar frustrations getting my G400Max to play DivX movies on the second head (my Toshiba TV). Actually, playing is working fine, but I just can't get it to look correct on the TV.

Yes, I've gone through the HOWTO's, but I've made so many tweaks and changes to my system in the process that I'm starting to get confused.

Initially I had gotten dual head to work--ie, X on my monitor and also on the TV using the mgapdesk software. However, when I played a video using mplayer and dragged the player over onto the TV, it would just show up green. So, that didn't work...

Next I tried the mplayer instructions trying to use the dfbmga output device. Got everything working except that when I try to play the movie, mplayer complains that it "Can't get CRTC2 layer - Not supported". When I do an lsmod, I see the matroxfb_crtc2 module loaded, so I don't know why it thinks this.

Using the directfb and mga output options of mplayer works... the video is playing fine on my monitor, however on the TV the picture is just scrolling rapidly round and round and you can't make anything out. I am guessing this needs to be fixed by tweaking fbset, but there a bundle of values in the fbset lines in the matroxtv script, and changing a couple of them had no obvious effect... it looks like it could take days to tweak these values and I wouldn't necessarily figure it out.

Anyways, can anyone help nudge me in the right direction? I feel like I'm getting close... I -can- see stuff on the TV, it's just not watchable.

[Ribbit]

I can't help you with TV output, but I can tell you that the reason it didn't work under X is because MPlayer was trying to use the hardware overlay, which the G-series doesn't have on the second head. If you use -vo x11 as an argument to MPlayer it should work. You could also try -vo gl or -vo gl2 - if those work, they may or may not be faster.

Those options will only work under X, BTW. But it sounds like you've almost got it working even better anyway.

[Variant]

Interesting, I'll have to keep that in mind. Actually, I finally got it working last night... I followed the directions on this page from scratch:

http://www.flashdance.cx/tv-out-mga-fb.html

... still had the flickering/rolling problem on the TV. I was just checking out what the matroxset program did, and noticed that in the script on that page matroxset was being called with a '1' where actually a '2' sets it to output to a TV. So I just ran 'matroxset 2' and suddenly the TV stopped scrolling! I fired up a movie and it's looking great now. I'll try and post a step by step history maybe of my adventures figuring it out later as almost everything I read was for the technically minded instead of in more laymen's terms