I have a Matrox G400 dual head card and I have managed to succesfully get the output to two monitors, however when you watch tv or playback video it only appears on the first monitor. I have found through forum and internet searches details on how to get round this by setting up framebuffers. However following all the instruction to the letter I cant getting proper display on monitor or TV out.

Most of the people who have got it working state they have a 2.4 kernel and I think I read somewhere that there was a problem with framebuffer support in a 2.6 kernel like mine.

Can anyone confirm whether the frambuffer stuff should work with a 2.6 kernel? Or even better has anyone got a Matrox G400 card to output video to the TVout with a 2.6 kernel?

Thanks in advance
Paul

I've never heard of anyone getting video to play on both screens of a dualhead setup on any video card period. That's why it's so much easier to just ditch the monitor all together.

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Xsecrets

Thanks for the reply, I am only trying to get the video/tv to display on the TV out ( second dual head output) , not on both.

At present without using frambuffers I see my X desktop on both VDU and TV, when I then select live tv in myth, it shows on the vdu and the tv goes blank and blue. What I would like to be able to do is watch mythtv and recordings on a the tv-out and therefore on the tv screen, i dont mind if the vdu goes blank.

Thanks
Paul

have you tried it with the vdu? (whatever that is) unplugged from the get go? I know on nvidia if you have a monitor plugged in then the video will only display on the monitor, however if you only have the tv plugged in with no monitor the video will display on the tvout.

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Xsecrets

Thanks for the tip I will check that out and see what happens. When I used the term vdu i mean my normal monitor.

Paul

Got it working, with video playing on both monitor and TVOut from the G400 dual head card.

What made the differance was including the matrox modules I required in the /etc/modules file instead of manualy modprobing them. The modules were :-

mga
i2c_matroxfb
matroxfb_crtc2
matroxfb_maven

Once they were loaded on boot up I had had to issue the frame buffer commands to map /dev/fb0 to both outputs, set the resolution to 800 * 600 and TV to PAL.

# matroxset -f /dev/fb1 -m 0 # this disconnects fb1 from outputs
# matroxset -f /dev/fb0 -m 3 # this connects fb0 to both outputs
# matroxset -f /dev/fb0 -o 1 1 # this sets fb0 to PAL output
# fbset -fb /dev/fb0 -xres 800 -yres 600 # set to 800x600 resolution

I am know getting automatic script to work to setup framebuffer at boot up.

Got this all from http://patrick.wagstrom.net/weblog/2005/Mar/07.

I am very pleased indeed managed to watch first Mythtv recordings on my 29" TV, perfect video and audio ( Even the wife was impressed !!!)

that is indeed very impressive. no other video card can do that,

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Xsecrets

I'm sure my geforce2 mx400 was doing this (video on both monitor and tv) when I was first setting my system up (using nvtv). Now I don't have a monitor connected so I can't easily check. Back then I wasn't using the nvidia driver.