After a number of years trying to get a picture on my extremely fussy lounge room TV from the computer, I finally bit the bullet and ordered a VGA to component transcoder - an Audio Authority 9A60A. This is because I am still using a Panasonic TX-76PW200A CRT TV, with only component inputs. Also, since it is not in the USA, the refresh rate is 50Hz,rather than the 60Hz that the nvidia drivers support out of the box. I mentioned in an earlier post that I was going to have a task getting a working resolution to the TV, but eventually something was found. Initially I used the program Powerstrip, with my desktop system set up in the lounge. A couple of settings worked, but with pretty bad overscan. Every time I tried tweaking it a little, the display just went out of range and I was greeted with a blank screen. Disheartened, I packed up the PC and contemplated putting the transcoder on ebay.
After a couple of days' break, i thought about trying again, this time with my laptop that runs linux and has a Mobility radeon graphics chipset. Using the xrandr command, I was able to feed it a modeline that I had found on another forum. An owner of the same TV I had, had managed to get a good picture up after a bit of experimenting. Lo and behold, I was able to get a picture up!
From memory, the xrandr commands used for the laptop were:
xrandr --newmode "1920x1080i_50" 78.300 1920 2464 2520 2784 1080 1102 1117 1125 interlace +hsync +vsync
That created a new mode for the display to use.
xrandr --addmode VGA-0 1920x1080i_50
This assigns the mode to the display device - in this case, it was to the VGA external output for the monitor.
xrandr --output VGA-0 --mode 1920x1080i_50
And that final command sent the 1920x1080 resolution to the VGA output - where the ubuntu desktop came up on the TV, much to my relief!
Knowing that the TV was capable of accepting the resolution, and that the transcoder was able to output the correct timings to the TV, it was back to the main box to see how the output worked from an Nvidia card.
The Nvidia binary driver unfortunately does not accept the xrandr commands I had used with the radeon drivers on the laptop, so another method was going to have to be used. After some inital lack of success with manually editing the xorg.conf file, I had a go using nvidia's utility designed for adding things to the file, nvidia-xconfig. Using the command:
sudo nvidia-xconfig --mode=1920x1080i_50
added a mode to the xorg.conf file. I opened that file up in a text editor and had a look where it turned up. When I found it, I added the following line straght below it:
Modeline "1920x1080i_50" 78.300 1920 2464 2520 2784 1080 1102 1117 1125 interlace +hsync +vsync
I restarted the machine to let nvidia-settings find the modeline. From there, it was then selectable from the resolution dropdown box, where I could choose it. It worked again!
The final step was getting it to work when the TV was the only display hooked up. To summarise, the xorg.conf file needed to be edited to remove all references to the PC monitor I had connected as well, so the TV was the only device it detected. Have a look at the xorg.conf file here, for your reference.
One other thing I had to do was set the PC to log in automatically - since this is to be a Home Theatre PC, there will not be a keyboard connected to allow typing in a password. It's not what I was after anyway. This option can be found under System -> Administration -> Login Screen
In a later entry I'll go over the setup of the actual system, and what I've learned in its first week of use.
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