I promised in a recent article to publish my “struggle” getting NVidia GeForce2 MX400+ TV Output working on my X setup, however there was no struggle, it ended up being a rather simple exersize.

First, before doing any of this, you must be running the closed-source “nvidia” GLX driver (not the open-source “nv” driver), details on this can be found here.

To add TV-Out support, a couple of lines of configuration change are needed to define two completely seperate Layout’s, one for TV-Out the other for CRT Out (this was when I implemented it a few days ago going to be a transient configuration, however I got so attached to having a loungeroom PC again, and missed my work PC so much that I had to dedicate a lounge room PC, more on that project soon!)

I’m in Australia, so the first thing to make sure that I have set is my TV Standard:

Section "Device"
  Identifier  "geforce2tv"
  Driver      "nvidia"
  VendorName  "nVidia Corporation"
  BoardName   "NV11 [GeForce2 MX/MX 400]"
  BusID       "PCI:2:0:0"
  Option      "TVStandard"            "PAL-B"
  Option      "ConnectedMonitor"    "TV"
  Option      "TVOutFormat"          "SVIDEO"
EndSection

The section for my Television was defined as:

Section "Monitor"
  Identifier   "TV"
  VendorName   "TV"
  ModelName    "TV"
  HorizSync    30-50
  VertRefresh  60
EndSection

Second last, we have the “Screen” definition:

Section "Screen"
  Identifier "tv"
  Device     "geforce2tv"
  Monitor    "TV"
  DefaultColorDepth 24
  SubSection "Display"
    Depth     24
    Modes     "800x600" "640x480"
  EndSubSection
EndSection

And one last one being the appropriate Server Layout:

Section "ServerLayout"
  Identifier     "tvout"
  Screen          0  "tv"         0 0
  InputDevice    "Mouse"          "CorePointer"
  InputDevice    "Keyboard"       "CoreKeyboard"
EndSection

It worked remarkably well, and I had no issues using it for watching movies, surfing the net (and even emailling occasionally over the weekend).