Output to a TV with NVIDIA Cards
Use two different methods to output your video to a TV. One method uses NVIDIA’s special drivers and the other doesn’t.
A general-purpose Linux computer has incredible potential for playing videos. You can play not only DVDs, VCDs, and SVCDs, but also any .avi, .mpg, or even Ogg Theora videos on your hard drive. Of course, sometimes your furniture isn’t exactly arranged to watch movies on the computer, particularly with friends. In these cases it would nice to be able to output your computer display to your TV where you can more comfortably seat a group of people. Often support for TV-out under Linux is spotty, depending on the manufacturer, but with an NVIDIA card, you can pretty easily set up a cloned display on your television with either NVIDIA’s drivers or output to TV with the nvtv utility. This hack covers how to set up both methods for TV out on modern NVIDIA video cards.
nvtv
nvtv is a program designed to talk to NVIDIA cards directly to enable their TV out modes. It doesn’t require any special video drivers or kernel support, so it is a good choice if you don’t wish to install NVIDIA’s Linux drivers.
nvtv is packaged by most major distributions, so you can find and install it with your standard distribution package tool. If your distribution doesn’t package it, download the precompiled binary tarball from the official nvtv page at http://sourceforge.net/projects/nv-tv-out. Since the files are already compiled, you can extract them from the ...