ATI Proprietary Driver

ATI proprietary drivers do have a bug in them which makes the combination of VideoOverlaying and TV-Out useless. If you have a display attached to the vga output connector, you will find the VideoOverlay mode fully functional. However when the TV-Out connector is used, you will see the top-half of the actual TV/DVD signal. Disabling this feature in the xorg.conf file (or use OpenGLOverlay instead) gives the whole TV/DVD signal, but may work slowly depending on the overall speed of the system you are using.

When having a computer monitor attached, use the following in the Device section of xorg.conf:
Option "VideoOverlay" "on"
Option "OpenGLOverlay" "off"

However, when using the TV-Out connector of the card use this instead (again, may be slow on your system, but gives _complete_ output):
Option "VideoOverlay" "off"
Option "OpenGLOverlay" "on"

Turning both on does not work (strange but true...)

On my personal (Athlon XP 1800+) mythtv system the TV/DVD playback functions are too slow, even with OpenGLOverlay mode active on the binary drivers. So for normal TV-Out functionality I went to the store and bought a NVidia card instead. My desktop system however (the 2nd mythfrontend :-) still functions perfectly with a ATI Radeon 9200SE. Attached to a monitor and with VideoOverlay active...

For users experiencing black-and-white TV output: please verify if the TVFormat option is set to the one valid for your country. All ATI cards I have seen default to the American TVStandard 'NTSC'. For a mythtv box in the Netherlands use the following option in the Device section in xorg.conf: Option "TVFormat" "PAL-B"