DVD Playing, SVideo out issues. Xandros/Debian.

[lilserenity]

(copied from another list i sent this to, i know you guys round here well some of you know who I am )

I am writing this email at last from Mozilla Thunderbird on Xandros 2.0. I finally ditched XP to replace my ThinkPad T23 with Linux; of which I am a lot more pleased with (as I expected) and it has overall gone very well compared to my abortive attempts with NetBSD on the Amiga some time around the mid-late 90s...

I have pretty much sussed most things out, such as getting DVDs to play (easy peasy), installing software (notably Firefox and Thunderbird which I am used to), setting up APM instead of ACPI etc.; I'm not a newbie to ThinkPads or computing; just Linux!

My query relates to DVDs and S-Video output via the S3 SuperSavage/IXC16's TV output. I found S3Switch easy enough and issued a s3switch tv command in the console (bash) and sure enough my telly showed the screen (best in 640x480 and 800x600 unsurprisingly). I can live with no having the LCD on at the same time; however something disconcerting has come to mind.

I have tried this with Ogle-MMX w/GUI and Xine with libdvdcss installed and all the rest of it (dependencies met basically) and whenever outputting the video on TV, the output is badly scrambled, and a big blue border on 640x480 and smaller on 800x600 - it almost looks like an overlay image not centered properly (this happens in window and full screen (ctrl+f in ogle) modes).
I am using Xandros' default S3 Savage driver, no changes made yet. Also the output seems to be NTSC which is annoying since I am in the UK and need PAL and it seems S3Switch does not support PAL output on Savage chips other than Savage3D chips.

I have searched high and low via google, to no avail I have tried pressing Fn+F7/F8 to see if it helps, not at all. The scrambled look sometimes occurs on the LCD but no often. I read there was an issue with X11 refreshing?

I have tried it in 16/24bit colour depths on VGA/SVGA and XGA resolutions.

My t23 is 1GB RAM, 40GB HD, 1.13GHz PIII-m, DVD-ROM and all the usual (XGA display, soon to be SXGA+ if I get my way ).

Any experience would be appreciated as I don't want to have to have a NTFS partition for WinXP just for PowerDVD (though I do like PowerDVD all told).

Is this a video driver issue?

Cheers!
Vicky