Written by Ville Syrjälä <syrjala@sci.fi>, original can be found at http://www.sci.fi/~syrjala/directfb/readme.txt For more information see also http://www.directfb.org -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- DirectFB includes TV out support for Matrox G400 cards. If you've used the Windows drivers you most likely know about DVDMax... DirectFB provides the same functionality. Now you can get excellent quality video playback on your TV. DirectFB TV output features: - interlaced picture - 720x576 50Hz PAL and 720x486 60Hz NTSC - RGB15, RGB16, RGB32, ARGB, YUY2, UYVY, I420, YV12 pixel formats - hardware blended sub-picure in I420 and YV12 modes - brightness, contrast, hue, saturation adjustments - no more tweaking sessions with fbset to get the image centered :) I recommend you use DirectFB 0.9.15 or later since some vsync problems were fixed in that release. Linux kernel setup: 1. Patch your kernel with matroxfb-vsync-c2vline-irq-patch-2.4.19.bz2 It's distributed with DirectFB sources in the patches subdirectory. This patch enables IRQ based vblank waiting. Make sure your card has an IRQ assigned to it. You may have an option in the BIOS setup for this. 2. Add "#define FBIO_WAITFORVSYNC _IOW('F', 0x20, int)" to /usr/include/linux/fb.h 3. Build and install the kernel. Set the following options: CONFIG_I2C CONFIG_I2C_ALGOBIT CONFIG_I2C_CHARDEV CONFIG_I2C_PROC CONFIG_FB_MATROX CONFIG_FB_MATROX_G100 CONFIG_FB_MATROX_I2C DirectFB doesn't require kernel support for the second head. In fact it may interfere with the TV out. 4. Make sure you have the proper /dev/i2c-N device file in place. After loading i2c-matroxfb module you should see MAVEN in /proc/bus/i2c. You must have the corresponding device file. To create these files use: 'mknod /dev/i2c-N c 89 N' where N is 0,1,2... The number might change depending on the order you load i2c modules so you may want to create some extra files. DirectFB setup: 1. Build and install DirectFB 2. Use the following DirectFB options: matrox-crtc2 matrox-tv-standard=pal or ntsc You can store them in /etc/directfbrc or ~/.directfbrc so that the will be used every time. That's pretty much it. Well you do need some applications. mplayer has a special video out plugin 'dfbmga' for this stuff. You need a recent version of mplayer to use it.