FireGL/ATI "Theater Mode" and driver question

[NathanA]

Okay, here's a head-scratcher for y'all. I'm trying to reproduce a setup that I got working on my T42p now on my new T60p. It'd be awesome if somebody out there knew the answer 'cause I've spent hours working on this and am getting a bit frustrated...

First, some preliminary information on how I have things set up (somewhat detailed...)

So, in the small apartment that I'm in right now, my 21" Trinitron is more than enough for me to watch movies on and such. My ThinkPad is my entertainment center (iTunes and WinDVD). With my T42p, I would hook the CRT up, and pump 5.1 sound out using an Audigy 2 ZS CardBus card.

To display movies on the monitor, I would set Windows to extend the desktop to it (rather than either using Clone mode or using the CRT exclusively) and would drive the display at 720x480 (the native resolution of all NTSC DVDs, widescreen or not...it is assuming non-square pixels and perhaps also some slight overscan). I had ATI Catalyst set to enable Theater Mode in Extended Desktop mode and to ignore the aspect ratio of the video. I then set the monitor's picture size controls to do the anamorphic squeeze for me so that I got the full vertical resolution of anamorphic DVDs (much like 4:3 TVs have a "16:9" mode...I'm just emulating this on a CRT). The monitor remembers different parameters for different resolutions, so it ONLY does this when I'm driving it at 720x480 @ 60Hz vertical refresh.

It looks pretty good for a 21" display.

Because the monitor also remembers display settings not just based on the resolution but also the refresh rate as well, I was able to take advantage of this by watching non-anamorphic WS/letterboxed video or 4:3 DVDs (such as older TV shows) on the monitor still in 720x480 simply by using a different refresh rate (such as 90Hz). I have a StreamZap remote with a macro on one of the buttons that toggles between refresh rates on the external monitor, so it basically acts as a one-touch "16:9 mode" switcher. ATI Theater Mode would always honor my external display's current resolution and refresh rate settings.

Now, in addition to this, when I was playing a movie on my T42p in this configuration, I was able to close the LCD display without affecting anything; that way I wasn't forced to see another duplicate of the same picture out of the corner of my eye, plus I could save the backlight (for people who haven't used ATI Theater Mode, it is not possible to minimize the real video window on the primary display; also, you can't just hit Fn-F3 to blank the LCD because the CRT gets shut off as well).

I was not using the native IBM/Lenovo FireGL drivers on my T42p, but was instead using ATI Catalyst 5.7 (yeah, old, but they worked great for this application) patched with the Mobility modder thingiemabob.

Now, cue the T60p with new FireGL V5200 hotness (or lukewarmness, I guess, if comparing to the T61p nVidia? ). Default drivers that come preloaded with it have two major problems, one related to Theater Mode, but both of which frustrate my efforts to duplicate my current T42p setup on my T60p:

1) ATI Theater Mode does NOT honor the external display's resolution or refresh settings. When the movie kicks in, the external display is automatically forced to 640x480 @ 60Hz, regardless of setting. ANNOYING.

2) When I close the lid on my laptop, the ThinkPad insists on shutting off the extended desktop on the secondary monitor and moves the primary desktop over to the CRT, making it the primary monitor!! When I open up the LCD screen, it doesn't revert back to previous settings, either. MAJOR-UBER ANNOYING.

I have partially fixed #2 by uninstalling Presentation Director. It still makes the CRT the primary display, but automatically reverts back the minute I open the LCD back up again, so PD was playing a part. However, I want to be able to shut my LCD and have the computer just pretend like nothing happened...still output secondary display to the CRT and let the primary one just remain hidden (I can turn off or even unplug the VGA cable for the CRT without the ThinkPad freaking out and with it still showing the secondary display as being 'enabled,' so why is the LCD treated differently?!).

I have also partially dissected the reason for problem #1. I installed the latest Omega drivers, which still behaved the same way as the stock ones with respect to Theater Mode. However, the ATI Tray utility revealed a couple of options that are not exposed by ATI's CCC utility, one of which is an "aspect ratio" option. If you set it to 4:3 (default), it will force 640x480; however, if you set it to 16:9, it keeps the 720x480 resolution! Bizarre, given that 720x480 does not map to (and, to my knowledge is generally not treated as) any standard widescreen aspect ratio (720/480 == 1.5:1), but whatever. I managed to track the registry entry that was being changed by ATI Tray when changing this option (by exporting the relevant registry section and running file compares on them...turned out to be OvlSavedSettings). I had to reinstall the original drivers because the Omegas were being screwy in other ways (720x480 would actually send an 800x600 signal to my CRT with black borders around the edges being used to "mask out" a 720x480-sized space!! so weird!), and once I was back to the stock drivers, I was able to reproduce 720x480 @ 60Hz in Theater Mode by changing the registry manually.

However, I still have a problem, and that is that it still INSISTS on using 60Hz refresh, even if I have it set to something else before starting playback of the video.

So, I still have two problems to conquer:

1) Make the video system COMPLETELY IGNORE LCD lid events, and just play it like an external monitor getting "turned off." I don't want it automagically switching to CRT output mode for the primary display if I shut the lid; if I wanted that, I would have DONE IT MYSELF before closing the lid! There's gotta be a way to change this... (I really detest hardware or software that tries to anticipate what I want rather than just taking my instructions verbatim.)

2) Somehow configure ATI Theater Mode to respect my configured refresh rate on the CRT.

Anybody have any leads that could help me out?

Thanks a bunch!

-- Nathan

[NathanA]

I solved one of my two problems! I can now close my LCD lid. I tried toggling a few ATI registry values that referenced "LCD Lid" with no effect (even after reboot).

In the end I discovered (after some more extreme Googling) that the culprit was the ATI Hotkey Poller service (ati2evxx.exe). After killing that, closing the LCD no longer results in the laptop switching automatically over to CRT output for the primary display! So I forced the service to "manual" startup instead of "automatic" and everything seems okay still after the change.

It's really strange, though, because with Catalyst 5.7 on my T42p's FireGL T2, I didn't have to kill this process to get the same behavior, and I just confirmed that it exists and is running on there as well. Although, in hindsight, I think that maybe my T42p did used to do this and installing Catalyst 5.7 changed this behavior; it's been so long since I messed with the drivers on the T42 that I don't remember exactly. But I guess that perhaps those drivers could conceivably be "broken" and I just happened to benefit from this particular malfunction.

Still don't know what to do about the refresh rate being forced by Theater Mode problem. It would also be a bonus if I could manage to get Theater Mode to also respect any resolution that I set on the secondary display like it did on my T42, but as long as I know how to make it do 720x480 in Theater Mode (which I already seemed to have tackled), I'm not too worried about that. Also, I noticed that whenever I reboot, the registry value that I changed in order to get the Lenovo drivers to output 720x480 on the VGA port is getting reset, probably by the stupid ATI CCC software. I can probably just script something up that changes it back every time, but good grief; it shouldn't be this difficult to reproduce functinoality I've been enjoying for months already.

-- Nathan

[meditate2001]

i remembered just erasing the ati2evxx.exe on my older machines just because it was the source of the long delay of showing the content of the screen after closing the lid and opening it again....

unfortunatly i never heard about the same thing for nvidia cards...anybody ?