LCD Analog and digital switching & playing movies under SuSE

charm

A few days ago I went out and bought myself a nice widescreen 19" LCD with both DSUB and DVI connections. It's been a pretty interesting experience using the LCD. At first I only had the DVI connection plugged into my system and nothing would get displayed on the LCD until Xorg loaded (the monitor switched to "digital" at this point). So I decided to plug in the analog connection and have both connected. Suddenly avi files which played before no longer displayed anything on the screen (I tried using Xine, Mplayer, and Totem, interestingly avidemux did display them). As soon as I pulled the analog Dsub connector the movies played fine.

I assume that the system needs to switch to digital mode to play the avi files and for some reason with the analog connector plugged in there's no auto-switching mechanism? Can I keep both plugged in to get the best of both worlds?

Cheers,

Charles
p.s. Using SuSE 10.1.

Comments

rbclemen Tue, 2006-11-14 12:22

I am just geting around to reading these comments. Sorry about the delay in the response.

It is most likely that the video isn't being displayed on the analog monitor, and while the cable is connected, you are seeing the analog monitor signal. What you have with a dual head video card is two independant screens, which right now are being drawn identically. If your video card is doing any video acceleration, it is likely only capable of displaying the output on the primary monitor. It is an annoyance to say the least.

It rears its ugly head in DVD playback under Windows as well, because of copyright restrictions on the commerical decoding engines.

If you can hook up a sepparate analog monitor and create a wide desktop across them both, I beleive you will be able to move the video completely onto either monitor and it will work fine. Or disable the XV plugin on your player temporarily, which almost certainly uses whatever acceleration is available in your driver. You may also disable XV hardware accelleration, if I recall.

I am guessing a framebuffer display during boot is the only way to get a digital picture in "text mode" during boot. Your video card does not generate a digital signal in text mode. I had a similiar problem using the old workstation monitors on a PC. They wouldn't display less than 1280x1024, so in text mode or in Windows Safe Mode I got a blank screen.