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What I need

Hello. I'm sorry for that strange question, but I need to use a composite TV-Out. I have an NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GT video card and it has an S-Video 7-Pin TV-Out port. I want to use it as composite output. I have a cable (S-Video to RCA Composite) connected to a video capturing card installed in another computer (don't even ask why I need it, it's really strange). Yes, I'm sure that cable is OK because I see image when OS isn't loaded yet, but I can't get image when NVIDIA's driver is lodaded. How can I fix this?

What happens

When I change video mode, resolution and something other related to TV out in driver settings, a glitchy image appears for ~200ms, then screen goes black. There is NO signal on the cable at all (I've checked it just by listening for some noice with a headphone).

When I disconnect all the monitors from DVI outs and leave TV-out alone and turn on my computer, the image appears and shows GPU's BIOS first, then motherboard's BIOS POST, then OS's boot logo, but when a video driver is loaded, the screen glitches and goes black. It can indicate us that my cable and the GPUs I used are okay and fit each other, it seems that the problem is something related to software.

What I've tried

I've tried several versions of NVIDIA drivers on different OSes but there was no positive result. My combinations of software were the following:

  • Windows 7 x64 & latest 342.01 driver from NVIDIA website
  • Windows 7 x64 & 181.71 driver from NVIDIA website
  • Xubuntu 17.10 x64 & nouveau driver
  • Xubuntu 17.10 x64 & proprietary 340.xx driver
  • Xubuntu 17.10 x64 & proprietary 304.xx driver

I surely tried to force TV detection and enable TV out as well, nothing helped. On Windows the setting of TV detection is grayed, on Linux it does not help.

I even tried to use another GPU card with the same 8600 GT chip from different vendors (ASUS and Gigabyte): the result is always the same on all these operating systems.

Did you ever face this problem? Do you have any idea how to work around this? Any suggestion is appreciated. Thank you in advance.

Community
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namikiri
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    Guess: The mode setup by the BIOS is different from the mode setup by the driver; one works, the other doesn't. What does `Xorg.log` say about the type of TV-encoder and mode? Also, TV detection (done by measuring resistances) may be spoiled by your S-Video to RCA adapter. At least on Linux, you can overide that in `xorg.conf` IIRC. – dirkt Jan 24 '18 at 21:38
  • @dirkt Can you tell me where's the `xorg.conf` for NVIDIA proprietary driver in (x)ubuntu 17.10? I'm aware of `/usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d`, but there's nothing about nvidia, only `radeon` and some common files. I'll read `Xorg.log` later and analyze it, thank you for your suggestion. – namikiri Jan 25 '18 at 09:21
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    Usually `/etc/X11/xorg.conf`, make one if it's not there. See https://us.download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86/340.98/README/xconfigoptions.html – dirkt Jan 25 '18 at 17:08
  • Ah, I still did not find the solution and just found a 7600GT graphic card. I just inserted it into a PCI-E slot and everything works fine without any tuning and configuring. It seems that 8600GT has some problems with TV-out. – namikiri Feb 01 '18 at 09:28

1 Answers1

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Tv-out works for me with the nvidia-340 driver with kernel 5.4.100 or older. Nvidia does not support newer kernels after 5.4. It doesn't work with the opensource nouveau driver.

Joël Pichette
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