NVidiaProprietaryDriver
Contents
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Version information
- 3 Before you begin
- 4 Installing the NVIDIA Driver
- 5 Common problems and solutions
- 6 Configure the monitor!
- 7 User experience with NVidia cards
- 8 Links to additional info
Introduction
NVIDIA does not provide the documentation for their hardware, which is necessary in order for programmers to write appropriate and effective open source drivers for NVIDIA's products. Instead, NVIDIA provides their own binary graphics drivers for X.Org. This closed source driver is referred to as the NVidia Proprietary Video Driver.
This document describes how to use the NVIDIA Proprietary Video driver. The latest driver can be downloaded from the NVIDIA download site
Version information
| Version: 100.14.19
|
Released on Sep 18, 2007
Quadro FX 290,FX 370,FX 570, FX 1700 more |
| Version: 100.14.11
|
Released on June 21, 2007
GeForce 7050 PV / NVIDIA nForce 630a GeForce 7025 / NVIDIA nForce 630a |
To determine your current version try
$ cat /proc/driver/nvidia/version NVRM version: NVIDIA UNIX x86 Kernel Module 1.0-9755 Mon Feb 26 23:21:15 PST 2007 GCC version: gcc version 4.1.1 20070105 (Red Hat 4.1.1-51) $
Resolutions supported by the driver depend on the card in use. But most cards have a TV-encoder onboard (the actual IC making the TV-Out connector(s) work) with only support for a few (lower) resolutions... all 4x3 aspect ratio :-(
Here's the list:
- 1024x768
- 800x600
- 720x576 (actually a very very good resolution for (european) TVs using the PAL TV-standard!)
- 640x480
Before you begin
Is your card supported?
Check if your card is supported by the driver, a list of supported hardware can be found in Appendix A of the README file.
Make sure you check the hardware list from the lastest version of the driver. As an example, (here is Appendix A from version 100.14.11) Also check the specs of your card, some integrated cards do not support dual screen. (pc screen and TV-out)
How is your TV connected? (TV-Out)
The type of output your video card can do, and the type of inputs your display device can handle are primarily what dictates what you should use to connect them. From highest- to lowest-quality, the order of consideration is: HDMI, DVI (both of which are digital), VGA, Component, S-Video and finally Composite (all of the rest are analog). Suggest you to read this http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/Highly_Technical_Details
What's your Television Broadcast Standard
Depending on your country, you use NTSC, (National Television Standards Committee) or PAL, (Phase Alternating Line) for you Television Broadcast Standard.
TVStandards
PAL-B used in Australia, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Guinea, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Italy, Malaysia, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland
PAL-D used in China and North Korea
PAL-G Denmark, Finland, Germany, Italy, Malaysia, The Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland
PAL-H used in Belgium
PAL-I used in Hong Kong and The United Kingdom
PAL-K1 used in Guinea
PAL-M used in Brazil
PAL-N used in France, Paraguay, and Uruguay
PAL-NC used in Argentina
NTSC-J used in Japan
NTSC-M Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico, Panama, Puerto Rico, South Korea, Taiwan, United States of America, and Venezuela
Installing the NVIDIA Driver
Basically, everything you need to get this working you will find in the README file from the driver; read the chapter Configuring TV-Out.
openSUSE users do not need to install the driver manually. Please see the opensuse nvidia section on howto add the NVIDIA repository and install the driver. WARNING: The Nvidia driver RPM's for openSUSE 10.2 are built against the default kernel (version 2.6.18.2) on the DVD and not the updated version in the security repository. if you have updated your kernel version either during installation or at any point after, please follow the instructions for "The Hard Way" method. This is because the rpms will prevent your Xorg graphics server from loading if installed with any kernel newer than 2.6.18.2
Common problems and solutions
Here is a test image for your mythTV system
click image to enlarge
Blue line(s) surrounding picture
One common symptom is the following: the NVidia driver may (or may not) give one or more blue lines surrounding the display during TV or DVD playback. This is something which is mostly seen on widescreen TV displays. The 'xvattr' command can be used to solve the problem:
xvattr -a XV_COLORKEY -v 66048
Add the command somewhere in the Xorg startup sequence. This may be done in various ways depending on your Linux distribution (need more distribution-specific information on this item!)
Solution for Debian GNU/Linux 4.0
Create the following file:
/etc/X11/Xsession.d/98custom_disable-blueline
and add the following contents:
#!/bin/sh xvattr -a XV_COLORKEY -v 66048
Restart your graphical environment and you're done!
Solution for openSUSE
Add the following line to /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc after "Add your own lines here":
#disable-blueline: xvattr -a XV_COLORKEY -v 66048
more on openSUSE and NVidia http://www.suse.de/~sndirsch/nvidia-installer-HOWTO.html
Black-and-White output
There are at least five possible causes:
TVStandard
Make sure the TVStandard option is set to the one valid for your country. Many nVidia cards 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 "TVStandard" "PAL-B"
If you're in the UK, use:
Option "TVStandard" "PAL-I"
Many other variations of PAL and other standards are supported. For a complete list, see the nVidia "readme" for your driver version (see the nVidia Linux driver download page).
Vertical Refresh Frequency
Some televisions will show a black-and-white image if you attempt to display video using an unexpected vertical refresh frequency, e.g. showing PAL-I format video at 60Hz instead of 50Hz. This is because the TV may use the vertical refresh frequency to decide whether it should be decoding PAL (usually 50Hz) or NTSC (60Hz). Either change the TVStandard (see above) to match the frequency, or change the frequency to match the video standard.
TVOutFormat
Some televisions support multiple video formats on a single SCART or S-VIDEO socket, but without auto-detection of the signal type. If you are seeing a sharp black and white image instead of a colour image, the nVidia card is probably outputting a Composite signal, but your TV is expecting S-Video. Either switch the TV to Composite or "AV" mode (not recommended), or set the following option in xorg.conf:
Option "TVOutFormat" "SVIDEO"
Conversely, to force Composite output (if your TV does not support S-VIDEO), use:
Option "TVOutFormat" "COMPOSITE"
S-Video generally has far superior image quality to composite video, especially from nVidia cards.
Annoyingly, some nVidia card/TV combinations will default to Composite mode at boot-time, meaning that your boot sequence will be in black and white until xorg.conf is loaded. (If anyone knows a fix for this (using different cables perhaps?), please insert it here!)
Television does not support S-Video
Some televisions do not support a S-Video signal on a SCART input. This results in only the luminance signal being used. A hack exists which merges the luminance and chroma signals on the SCART connector which essentially creates a composite signal that the television uses. This is performed by connecting pins 15 (chrominance in) and 20 (luminance in) on the SCART connector. This signal is unfiltered and is at best equal in quality to a direct composite connection. See this thread for further information.
Cable Connections
Obvious perhaps, but make sure that the ends of your cables are firmly in place! (especially if you're using SCART/RGB sockets)
Annoying NVIDIA logo?
To get rid of that annoying NVidia logo at startup, add this line in the 'Device' section of xorg.conf:
Option "NoLogo" "True"
Small (unreadable) fonts or too big fonts?
The entire GUI of Mythtv was designed for 100 DPI screens, and the fonts are based on that selection as well.
See Specifying DPI for NVidia Cards.
System instability
The first port of call if your graphics card is unstable is the README that is included with your Nvidia driver package. There may be an online version of the README linked from the Nvidia Linux driver page for your system's processor architecture.
You should also have a look at the Linux forums which are linked to from the same page.
Try to reduce the AGP speed down (this seems to be a problem with boards with VIA KT333 and KT400 chipsets and also earlier VIA chipsets). Follow the instructions in the README for configuring the AGP rate. With an MSI KT4 Ultra (MS-6590) and Nvidia GeForce 6200A video card, the default AGP speed of 8x made the system unstable. Once it was set to 4 the system became rock steady. The BIOS changes weren't tried, they may also have helped and avoided the need for the edit/recompile.
It's possible to perform initial testing by disabling AGP entirely using the NvAGP option in your X11 config file. Check the APPENDIX F, AGP section in the README for more details.
As noted in the NVidia release notes there are known issues with some VIA chipsets as found on Athlon XP mainboards; The KT266 and KT333 chipsets are known to have problems. The solution described in the releasenotes did not solve my instability problems. However, booting the system with the 'noapic' option appended to the kernel boot line was enough to get my system stable. --Michel 14:20, 26 March 2007 (UTC)
Choppy video/High CPU Usage
Symptoms:
- Choppy video
- CPU usage near 100%
- Xorg using the most CPU time
- mythfrontend using the second most CPU time
- other processes using negligible CPU time
- Sync to VBlank set in nvidia-settings
Solution: Add the line
Option "UseEvents" "True"
to the Screen or Driver section of /etc/X11/xorg.conf.
Configure the monitor!
The NVidiaProprietaryDriver supports monitors as well as TV screen (using TV-Out). To use a (wide-screen) TV as monitor, see XorgConfMonitorSectionForTV. If the basic TV configuration appears correctly, but the image does not fit exactly on your television set, you may need to adjust the so-called Overscan.
User experience with NVidia cards
- NVIDIA GeForce2 MX AGP: works (Michel: Nov 2006 )
- NVIDIA GeForce4 MX440 AGP: works (Michel: Nov 2006 )
- NVIDIA FX5200 AGP: works (Michel: Nov 2006 )
- NVIDIA 6200LE PCI-e: works (Moosylog: Jan 2007 )
- NVIDIA Riva TNT2 AGP: defunct (Michel: Nov 2006 )
- NVIDIA Riva TNT AGP (also known as AGP-V3400): defunct (Michel: Nov 2006 )
More user experience can be found on the mythTV wiki TV Out page
Links to additional info
Internal mythTV wiki:
Specifying_DPI_for_NVIDIA_Cards
External:
