FX 5200: Horizontal lines in 1920x1200 with Xv

[gabuzo]

I installed a new Dell 2407WFP monitor on my Linux box equiped with a Geforce FX 5200. Everything is working fine excepted when trying to play videos in full screen (with Xv) where get flickering horizontal lines. The problem was originally seen with mplayer but I manage to reproduce it with any other player using Xv for display. The problem only arises with Xv in 1920x1200 (no problem in 1680x1050) and the number of lines increase with the size of the video. Attached are two samples: the first one is from Lord of the Rings supertrailer (640x272) and the second one is from the Zodiak trailer (1280x544) as well as the log from mplayer -v -fs ... and nvidia-bug-report.

[pe1chl]

I can confirm this. It will disappear when you reduce the video area only by a little, e.g. by running mplayer in a maximum size window instead of fullscreen.

I think the 5200 is not powerful enough for 1920x1200 video, my problem has disappeared after changing the card to a 6600GT (although that also is not optimal for video)

[pgs]

Are you using DVI connection?
If I recall correctly, the 5200 has a single link DVI interface rated max 135.00MHz.
1920x1200@60Hz, even with reduced blanking, is around 154.00MHz, so it should not work. Practically it could work, good or bad.
The artifact you see, might be some pixel clocking error, due to the too high interface speed.

One possibility is to try @50Hz, with reduced blanking, this has around 127.00MHz clock, but, in my experience, very few monitors support it.
For details on how to generate the modelines look for cvt.c/cvt.exe.

Hope this helps,

bye,

pgs

[gabuzo]

Originally Posted by pgs

Are you using DVI connection?

Nope, I'm lucky this time, I did use the VGA connection. However my guess is that if the 5200 DVI connection does not have a high enough pixel clock, I will see the artefacts everytime, not only when using the Overlay mixer.

However I did a quick test with the Xorg nv driver rather than nvidia and I did observe the same artefacts. Some my guess is that 5200 has not enough bandwidth somewhere (memory perhaps). Unfortunately I don't know how to compute the required bandwidth and check against the 5200 specs.

[pe1chl]

Originally Posted by gabuzo

my guess is that 5200 has not enough bandwidth somewhere (memory perhaps).

Yes it looks like it. I tried with VGA as well as DVI and both failed the same way. It is not related to the interface.
(it is possible to use the DVI interface at a reduced vertical rate and the same issue still persists. It probably is a limitation of the video overlay hardware)