TV out

mine is an 8887, but the graphics card (and therefore, the tv-out) is the same.

i tried atitvout with x but didn't get very good results - the colors and res were all messed up. however, atitvout works fine on the console, if i force it to use rage mobility mode with the -f flag. (which is odd; i would have thought that forcing it to use radeon mode with -r would be the right one. oh well.)

... so the next logical step if the console works? use the framebuffer. i set up the vesa framebuffer, and exported that with 'atitvout -f t', and then i can use mplayer from the framebuffer device to play on the tv. works perfectly.

i would have preferred to use directfb as it's faster, but dfb doesn't have radeon support yet. (well, the latest version does, but i would need radeonfb working anyway, which i can't seem to do)

i don't use the max resolution, 1600x1200. i use half, 800x600, to eliminate resolution scaling ugliness - because if i choose to use the fbcon driver and need to scale it to be fullscreen, it would have to use a software scaling filter, which takes cpu power which could possibly take away from video performance - especially at 1600. i could use vidix for hardware scaling, but that requires root privileges, something i'm not always interested in using. and besides, the vesa fbcon driver just plain crawls at 1600, whether it's video or just text, even with mtrr and ywrapping.

so my typical commands would look like:

atitvout -f t

and

mplayer -ao alsa9 -vo fbcon -vop scale=800:-2,pp -autoq 6 -cache 8192 -autosync 30 -framedrop blah.avi

for software scaling, or

mplayer -ao alsa9 -vo fbcon:vidix -vop pp -autoq 6 -cache 8192 -autosync 30 -framedrop -double -fs blah.avi

for hardware scaling, if i'm root. i would never make the mplayer binary setuid root. and

atitvout -f l

to switch back to the lcd when i'm done.

hope that helps.

http://www.retinalburn.net/linux/

Check that out - cant testify to its effectiveness - but appears to cover your problem