[ydl-gen] Video modes on the PS3

[Warren Nagourney]

Apparently your conjecture is correct: the PS3 requires an HDCP  
monitor to display video. I brought home a working Viewsonic VA712b  
monitor whose native resolution is 1280x1024 and wasn't able to get  
an image. Interestingly, the monitor's info panel indicated that it  
was getting the proper signals and displayed the correct resolution,  
but there was no information on the screen (I turned up the brightness).

So I guess I need to get a 1280x1024 HDCP monitor or live with the  
awful scaled display on the Samsung. This would be hard - it is bad  
enough that moving a window reminds me of machines of a decade ago  
(like my NeXT) which lacked fast video, but to have a horrible  
looking display as well is too much.

By the way, I tried the "full screen mode" using mode number 139  
(full screen at 1280x720). I got a garbled image on the screen, then  
nothing. The display info panel gave the correct resolution.

-wn


On Jan 8, 2007, at 1:39 PM, David Seikel wrote:

> On Mon, 8 Jan 2007 12:50:54 -0800 Warren Nagourney
> <warren at phys.washington.edu> wrote:
>
>> I have done some investigation of the various video modes on the PS3
>> (in Linux) and find that one is not very badly compromised when
>> using a standard computer monitor.
>>
>> First, there are at least 3 VESA modes which are the same as
>> standard computer modes (at 60 Hz):
>>
>> Mode 11  -  1280x768
>> Mode 12  -  1280x1024
>> Mode 13  -  1920x1200
>>
>> I am considering trying numbers >13 to see what happens. After all,
>> the RSX is a modified NVIDIA GPU and they probably support lots of
>> modes in addition to the published ones. All I need is a working
>> "ps3videomode" command - it was not installed with the standard YDL5
>> installation (nor was "emacs", "locate" and a host of other nice
>> commands - does anyone know an easy way to get them all without
>> installing the RPMs individually?)
>
> Have you tried something like -
>
> yum install emacs locate ps3videomode
>
>> These three modes work on my Samsung 940B (using the digital port)
>> whose native resolution is 1440x900. I was blown away that the
>> 1920x1200 worked, though the monitor put up a little message
>> complaining about it. Of course, they were all scaled and looked
>> more or less fuzzy (actually the 1920x1200 was best, but I got a
>> headache from the fuzziness using it for any time). I believe that
>> using a DVI- VGA adaptor should allow the monitor to avoid scaling at
>> the expense of a small dark border (on modes 11 and 12).
>>
>> By the way, the Samsung monitor is HDCP compliant, but I find it
>> hard to believe that this matters for anything except (possibly)
>> playing a BlueRay movie. I am pretty sure it doesn't matter in Linux.
>
> Lack of HDCP on a DVI monitor may matter on Linux, even though it
> shouldn't.  I have heard that the PS3 wont even turn on the HDMI  
> output
> unless the monitor it's plugged into is HDCP compliant.  If this is
> true, then a DVI to VGA adaptor wont help.  I'm going to be
> experimenting with this quite heavily over the next two weeks on a
> variety of monitors.  I'll let you know what I find.
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