So I replaced my ATI Rage with an FX5200 card, and the tv out worked out of the box. Only thing is, there's a faint white stripe on the screen that brightens the color in that area (black turns gray, and colors are lightened visibly). I tried changing everything I could think of in my XF86Config-4 file, but wasn't able to get it to disappear (I did manage to get it from 2 stripes down to 1.. not sure how)

anyway, here's a link to a pic of what I'm talking about. Any ideas? thanks

it's randomly back to 2 stripes again.. and while I get a better signal with the S-Video to Composite cable the card came with (not sure why?), the stripes are still there. Its almost as if the Horizontal refresh is off, but I dont want to play with it too much and potentially damage my tv (some of the example scripts made it sound like I could?)

Have you tried different modelines?

I've tried the ones generated for the ATI card I started with, none, what was in the sample nvidia XF86Config that came with knoppmyth, and right now am using an FX5200 XF86Config I found online... all have the stripes.

it doesn't bother my roommates, but I notice it

1) Hardware and TV standard details! What are you using for a TV or monitor? Is it NTSC or PAL?

2) For s-video or composite output on an NTSC TV make sure you have "HorizSync 30 - 50" and "VertRefresh 60 - 60".

I've got an older compaq with a CompUSA FX5200 DVI/S-Video card driving a Samsung 27" TV (which is NTSC).

The stripes don't appear on a VGA monitor connected to the DVI output via the included adapter.

They do appear even while linux is loading (as in the picture), before the XF86Config-4 even has any effect.

I've tried the standard 30-50 and 60 settings with no difference (also tried 30-37 for the horizontal to see if it'd have any effect)

Try running from another PC, maybe a windows desktop or laptop with s-video. See if you get the white line then? If so, rule out your vid card, myth, Linux.

don't know why i didn't think of that..

so, I tried both my roommates Dell with s-video out (both s-video to s-video, and the s-video to composite cable I'm using with my mythbox right now), and an old iBook with the composite out cable, and niether had the white stripe symptom on my TV.

then for good measure, I brought my mythbox over to my other roomates tv in her room, and my mythbox did NOT have the white stripes.

so.. its something weird about my Samsung TV and whatever setup I have on my mythbox

Maybe try an old HD with Windoze on it. Update the driver, and see if you get the white stripe. If so, I'd look for another video card. If you see a nice picture with windows, then maybe it's a driver? I doubt it's the driver though, as you see the stripe pre-boot. To confirm, boot from a DOS diskette or bootable WinXP CD and see if you see the strip there too or not, during the character-mode portion of the boot?

I haven't tried booting windows yet, but I was in the kernal log troubleshooting an entirely different problem, and saw this line



after investigating on nvidia's website, thats one of the legacy drivers (and not even the newest version) which doesn't even technically support my card. 1.0-8762 is the current Linux driver for current cards, so I'm going to try installing that and see if the stripe issue gets fixed (after i figure out this other issue at least)