This one has had me puzzled for some time now. Areas of the screen which show very white images are displaying static. For example, if a person in a show is holding a flashlight, the bulb of the flashlight will show up as static. I get this in shows, movies and in the Gallery for digital pictures.

My setup is a laptop with KnoppMyth R5.5 and an "ATI Technologies Inc RV350 [Mobility Radeon 9600 M10]" video card over the TV-out connectors to a magnavox and samsung TV (old, standard def TVs). I've tried s-video, and video-out with different cables. I've tried different inputs on the back of the TV, also. When the image is displayed to the laptop LCD, there is no static.

When I show the color bars test pattern (y4mcolorbars -n 2000 -It -v 0 -S 420jpeg | yuvplay), the white color looks okay, but the edges of the white bar are static.

I figure this has something to do with the refresh rate, or something in the modeline I'm using. I'm using the radeon driver (xserver-xorg-video-ati 1:6.9.0-1+lenny4) with a modeline of:

Modeline "800x600" 40 800 840 968 1056 600 601 605 628 +hsync +vsync

I am completely out of ideas. Does anybody know what I can try?

How does it look with a VGA monitor?

Mike

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LinHES 7.4
Australian Dragon
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A CRT attached to the VGA port displays just fine. I've attached pictures from both the TV and the monitor. (Unfortunately, I paused it at a spot where the image is intentionally blurred , but the difference should be noticeable between the two images).

TV:

CRT: [/img]

See the PictureQualityIssues page on the wiki for more, but just off the top of my head...

- Check your deinterlacing. I've always had the best luck with bob2x, also use the on screen menus to see if it's auto detecting the frame order incorrectly. (i.e. manually switch between the different options to see if there is an improvement)

- Match your playback resolution to the recording. Using 800x600 means that the image is being scaled at an odd ratio from 720x4880 which can create artifacts. This has different effects depending on your video card and TV. For me it meant washed out colors, but it can also produce banding at any orientation from horizontal through diagonal to vertical.

- Don't underestimate the difference good cables can make. If your connections aren't good your quality will suffer. Also be aware that especially with cables price and quality often have very little to do with each other. You can often get better cables on-line at someplace like monoprice.com for $2-$10 than you can buy in the local big box rip off store for $50-100. Bad cables can cause problems through bad connections, cross talk, and a number of other mechanisms.

It's been some time and I've tried quite a few things and identified the problem, but don't quite have a working solution. I tried a few different cables, but that seemed to make no difference. I eventually tried changing the video driver. I was using the ati driver from debian's repositories, xserver-xorg-video-atimisc. I changed to the fglrx driver and the problem goes away.

The problem now is that TV is unwatchable. I've been reading some of the other threads and discovered that it's because the driver is choosing the Mesa drivers instead of the accelerated drivers. I've tried compiling my own drivers from ati's support site, but those don't want to insert into the kernel for some msi problems. I'm going to continue to peruse the other threads and see if I can find out what the deal is.

Thanks for your help.