TwinView with TV

I plugged my TV into my old nVidia card.

[2008-02-05]

[I googled myself, as one does, and noticed this article, from my old homepage, was #3. Well, for all the people that want to read it, I've put it back. Unfortunately the URL is different. Sorry. ...]

I recently plugged my TV into my old nVidia card. And learned not to forget about metamodes.

When we had some buddies round for supper on Saturday, the computer had to move from the dining room table to next to the TV. And I wondered why I hadn't plugged the TV into the back of the graphics card before.

My home PC is old. And not just in doggy years. It's a PIII and runs dog slow at 666 MHz -- a bit like an undead Hell Hound. But it does have an nVidia GeForce2 MX 400, which comes with a composite TV out.

The other thing about home is the lack of ADSL and 3G coverage. Which is why I didn't really feel like downloading the newer-than-the-packaged nvidia driver. For a while now, nVidia's nvidia-settings command will configure TwinView nicely for you. But not the older version in the Ubuntu Edgy restricted repository.

But that was OK. Hell, I can remember most of the settings anyway. So I thought, as I edited my xorg.conf file, and restarted gdm a bunch of times.

Well, it turns out that you do need the metamodes line. And in South Africa we use PAL-I. Or at least that's what my xorg.conf file says, and it's working for me. If you're curious, my driver section looks like so:


 Section "Device"
        Identifier      "nVidia GeForce2 MX 400"
        Driver          "nvidia"
        BusID           "PCI:1:0:0"
        
        Option          "RenderAccel" "true"
        Option          "TwinView" "true"
        Option          "ConnectedMonitor" "CRT,TV"
        Option          "MetaModes" "1024x768,720x576"
        Option          "TVStandard" "PAL-I"
        Option          "TVOutFormat" "COMPOSITE"
        Option          "TwinViewOrientation" "RightOf" 
EndSection

[Hope that helps.]

☙