Radeon 8500, no TV?

[lindberg]

Just got my hercules FDX 8500 LE 64MB card (temporary until I get the parhelia and my G400 is burned) and I tried yesterday with the so-called hydravision. But I was totally unable to get the tv-out activated at all!

Does Hercules have broken drivers or what is it? I have the tv connected to the tv-out via a s-vhs cable. Naturally I didn't have any success with the hydra vision since I couldn't even enable the tv-out... Is it really this hard?

Boy, I wish my G400 still worked, the dvd-max rocked...

Is the problem with no tv-out familiar?

[Indiana]

Sorry for the late answer but I didn't have much time in the last two days.

TVOut should work without any problems. There was some talk that you need a special cable that Hercules left out of theri package (It's included with the Built by ATI models). That said I use a standard SVHS cable here with my Radeon8500LE and have no problems whatsoever. Are you sure your TV supports SVHS? Are you using some kind of adapter?

[lindberg]

Well, not directly. I've got an adapter in the rear end (of the TV ofcourse ) for svhs->scart. I saw someplace that it probably won't work that. So I tried to connect via the rca-cable but not that either worked, this is still connected in the adapter.

I'll carry up my second tv which supports svhs and test with it when I get the time, but I would have prefered that it worked as it is since the other tv is the "main" tv...

I really hate this kind of "auto detect, it's as far as I know not good for anything

Long live the matrox where the signal was send to the tv if when you activated the tv-out.

[The PIT]

Floating around on Rage3d forums I heard theres problems with certain drivers with tv out but can't sure of it.
They are some newer drivers out but you'll have to hack them to work with your Herc. Check out rage3d forums for instructions.

[Indiana]

It's most likely his adapter. 9/10 "TVout not selectable" or "TVOut only b/w problems" with the Radeon8500 are because of wrong adapters. There ARE, however, standard adapters that will work.

[lindberg]

This sux!!!

Finally got the TV-Out to work when I switched TV, but videos doesn't show in the TV!!! When I start a video player such as media player/PowerDvd the only thing I see in the TV is the frame of the player! Any movies/clips won't show at all! This card seems to be full of unwanted features!

I think I saw somwhere that this was a copyright issue but I' not sure. That the video-output to any other screen than the main one would be disabled. I was going to check out an ati forum but the page was down... I wish that the parhelia wouldn't be so overpriced so I could buy it and get the DVD-max back

[Indiana]

That's a simple issue. Since the Radeon unfortunately has only one hardware Overlay (like all other cards except for the Parhelia), videos are always ONLY shown on the monitor marked as primary.
So just set the TV as primary and the CRT as Clone and you will get your overlay on the TV.

Or leave the CRT the primary and just enable the "Theater Mode". This is a blatant theft of Matrox' DVDMax and it works the same: any overlay you're playing back is output fullscreen on the secondary Monitor/TV/TFT/...
When you're using ATIs player you can even minimize the overlay to the taskbar and still have it fullscreen on the secondary out.

[lindberg]

Is the "theater mode" only available in ati drivers or where do I find that? I think I've been through every single tab/dialog concerning the display settings...

Thanx for the help though

[Indiana]

It's here:
.
The button is missing in some driver releases, you can get it by editing some registry settings in any newer version though. Which version are you using?

The newest Catalyst AFAIK have it enabled by default - another option would be installing the Omega/Plutonium tweaked drivers, they're having it enabled as well.

[lindberg]

I use Hercules provided driver v7.66 , my check button is missing. Guess it's registry search now then..

[Indiana]

The 7.66 driver is stone-old. Current Reference drivers are at 7.72 (7.73 for leaked ones)
Why not use a more recent one?
Like this one (ATI): http://download.ati.com/drivers/part...4m-004274c.exe
Or this (Omega/Plutonium): http://www.omegacorner.com/drivers/r...omega_2171.exe
Both should work fine on ALL Radeon based cards, including your Hercules one.

The registry settings:
Search for "TheaterMode" and set ALL (there might be quite a few) "DisableOverlayTheaterMode" and the "DisableOvlTheaterMode" entries to 0.

There are "OverlayTheaterMode" and "OvlTheaterMode" settings as well, that you might want to set to 1, although you should be able to do this with the button in the display preferences once you've set those "Disable..." to 0

[The PIT]

If you wait a few more days Cyborg should be releasing another win2k set based on the latest leaked set. At present he's only released the XP version.

[lindberg]

Heh, one can ask oneself.. Haven't dared install never drivers yet since I just got the card and don't know what works/don't work

I'll install the 7.72 and try to be a little bit cooler

[lindberg]

I'm not impressed at all of the TV-out on the radeon card. The picture is not full sized (there is about a 5cm stripe missing in the top and bottom) even though I use s-vhs. The side edges of the image are a bit round also. I tried to adjust the picture in the properties dialog but it only starts to clip the image

Maybe it would work to throw in a pci G400 and use it for tv-out. Atleast matrox had full sized image and I would also say that the quality was a bit better on the matrox card. Jeez, think about it, a 3 year old card is still better than what the rivials can make today (when talking about the tv-out feature).

[KeiFront]

Originally posted by lindberg
I'm not impressed at all of the TV-out on the radeon card. The picture is not full sized (there is about a 5cm stripe missing in the top and bottom) even though I use s-vhs.

You can get a full sized view when you enable the overscan feature from the Radeon drivers.

You can enable this feature with a registery tweak (do a search on the internet about ATI TVEnableOverscan and I'm sure you will find the right registery key) or simple use Radeontweaker to enable this feature.