Today I spent the afternoon testing various video drivers and hardware with Bryce. My “workflow” for watching a movie from my laptop on a projector in Hardy is much simpler now. :) For ATI, everything Just Works, with one small exception: Xv. By default (at least with the open ATI driver), the Xv port displays to the LCD on the laptop instead of out an attached VGA port. This is controlled by the “XV_CRTC” Xv attribute, which is settable with the “xvattr” utility.
To watch a movie:
- Plug in projector
- Open System/Preferences/Screen Resolution
- Pick nice big resolution for the attached projector
- Run “xvattr -a XV_CRTC -v 1” (“-v 0” will push Xv back to the LCD)
- Eat popcorn
© 2008, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.
Wow, this has been a major irritation for a long time, and I didn’t know it was this easy to fix. Lately, I’ve been using mplayer with “-vo x11 -zoom” or “-vo gl”, but this hasn’t produced the output I wanted. Thanks a bunch! :)
Comment by Dag S — April 5, 2008 @ 11:34 pm
I gotta say, I’ve been using projectors on the last couple of versions of ubuntu on my radeon 9700 with the open source driver on a simple dual screen setup – if I plug in the projector on the VGA-OUT, it just works! I never had a problem with films either..
Comment by max stirner — April 6, 2008 @ 5:12 pm
Yay, that’s got MythTV playing properly onto an external screen via VGA with Ubuntu Intrepid!
Comment by Chris Samuel — October 24, 2008 @ 5:38 am