HDMI output problem

[bugmenot]

Hello,
I just wanted to tell you that I tried last week to get a Medion MD30238 (32" TV) working on HDMI. I brought a HDMI cable at ebay, and tried it, first there was only a black screen. Then after figuring an hour or so I got it to make a picture, but only not in the middle of the screen and also not the correct resolution. I tried every driver on earth:
With radeonhd there appeared one monitor, but it gave no screen. After at lot of trying around I made it to make a bad screen
With radeon there were *two* monitors in the xrandr gui of gnome, no idea why and what, but there was one screen too much. One "OEM something" and one other. Anyway, with radeon I got at least a picture, but also not perfect, but better than with radeonhd.
Then I tested catalyst. I needed a few (!) restarts to make it work at all, but then ne monitor was connected at all. After trying around again, it was able to recognise the monitor but could not make a picture.
After that I tried windows catalyst, an old version. There a picture out of the box, but with the wrong resolution. Then I tried the newest catalyst (9.3) and there was again no picture at all. I had to define a special mode, as if there was wrong edid data. But I could only get a wrong resolution. Or stretching, but that looks ugly again.
I searched in the internet and found out that this monitor does also not work with a special receiver and also not with it's native resolution.
1366 x 768 or so. I seems simply that this is a bad monitor.

In one week here are holidays, then I will to to get it working with open drivers again. I have just no time at the moment. Hopefully there will be an acceptable solution. HDMI cables are so expensive :/

[gtrawoger]

It's interesting you mentioned the HDMI cables. From what I know, the cheaper cables are just not of the same quality. Especially if it they are much longer than a 1 meter (3 feet).

I don't buy all the hype around these $150.00 cables (I bought some ebay cables too, and they work great for 720P). But why not go to a futureshop or other store that has a return policy, and see if a "quality" cable would make a difference. At least you can rule it out as being a source of the problem.

[bugmenot]

Good idea. I think I'll test with a better cable, although I don't think that it's the cable's fault. But maybe you are right.

[yonux]

Hi,

Some news.

I've been able to play a PS3 game in 1080p on my HDTV (thanks to a friend PS3 owner).
I also watched a 1080p film with my PC with a Nvidia card (under Window$).
On the both case, when image appears on the screen, TV prints for a couple of second, on the upper left corner, "1080p".

So, the TV is working fine in 1080p, and it's not the problem at all.
(even if Sony manual says that only PS3 is able to works at this resolution).


Question :
Is there driver's options or anything else I can do on my Linux box to have a 1080p image ?
(I'm already using the Git repository of Radeonhd driver)

[bugmenot]

Do you use a new sxerver? For me it made a huge difference which xserver was used, although the driver version was the same. It's working somehow now btw. 720p, but the monitor cuts a bit at the top and at the bottom. The windows driver had a functionatily for this, i did not found it for the radeon driver, yet. But I think anyway that it's the monitors fault.

[yonux]

I'm using Debian testing version (1:7.3+18 right now).
7.4 in unstable release, but I don't really want to switch to it ...

Can you tell me more about differences you saw between Xorg versions you tried ?

[nanonyme]

So, the TV is working fine in 1080p, and it's not the problem at all.
(even if Sony manual says that only PS3 is able to works at this resolution).

I seriously hope you haven't run into a Digital Rights Management issue where the display card would have to send just the right kind of data to get a 1080p connection. The fact that they say it only works with PS3 hints to that direction.

[yonux]

I seriously hope you haven't run into a Digital Rights Management issue where the display card would have to send just the right kind of data to get a 1080p connection. The fact that they say it only works with PS3 hints to that direction.

Not at all, I was able to play some AVI files (hollidays films ...) on my Window$ + NVidia card without any problem.

More over, on Linux I can see WindowManager desktop in 640x480 and 800x600, but nothing else upper than these two resolutions.

So no DRM problem.

[nanonyme]

Not at all, I was able to play some AVI files (hollidays films ...) on my Window$ + NVidia card without any problem.

More over, on Linux I can see WindowManager desktop in 640x480 and 800x600, but nothing else upper than these two resolutions.

So no DRM problem.

Actually that doesn't prove anything. nVidia drivers are closed ones so they could well have whatever DRM would be needed. Also the DRM solutions I've heard of have been *specifically* for full HD resolution, lower resolutions were showed fine.

[bugmenot]

Can you tell me more about differences you saw between Xorg versions you tried ?

I used Ubuntu 8.10 with the newest drivers and some things did not work. After updating to 9.04 it worked somehow, allthough i still used git version of the drivers. So I think the xserver has to do with it. don't know exactly about the versions though. I'd suggest trying a few live cds (Ubuntu, fedora...) and see if there is a difference.