Play a movie on TV through an Nvidia card

Even in these days of RandR and the modular Xorg, some people still have trouble playing a video through their computer on their television. Specifically the proprietary Nvidia cards cause problems. There are even users who think that using proprietary drivers for their Nvidia cards is the only way to use TV-out. That is not true and I for one even find it less troubling when you use the nv driver, which is free software.

While running Xorg with the nv display driver, I installed the little utility nvtv (slightly patched). Put nvtvd in your default runlevel. I wrote the following shell script, called mplayot for playing a movie on my television:

  
#!/bin/sh
echo mplayer-on-tv v0.3.7
# Pause your music
mpc pause
nvtv -r 800,600 -s Large -t -C CONVERT --set \\
    TVPositionX:-3,0 || echo Problem with nvtv!
XSCRSAV=NO
if ! [ `ps -C xscreensaver | wc -l` = 1 ]; then
        killall xscreensaver
        XSCRSAV=YES
fi
# Put xorg blanking of display to two hours
xset s 7200
mplayer -fs -osdlevel 1 -vo xv -spuaa 4 \\
    -screenw 800  -screenh 600 -ao alsa "$@" &&\
# Put it back to 10 minutes
xset s 600
# This fixes some display problems
xrandr -s 640x512
xrandr -s 1280x1024
if [ $XSCRSAV = "YES" ]; then
        xscreensaver &
fi

This just works.