Several months ago I posted the tale of my adventures trying to get video and audio through the HDMI port on my Toshiba Laptop with an Nvidia video card. It took me the better part of three days of trial and error to figure out, and it still takes a lot of patience to switch audio & video functionality from onboard to HDMI or back.
A couple of weeks ago I received a new laptop. Since it was intended to be strictly a work machine I didn’t care whether the HDMI port functioned or not, and I never tried it. This morning I woke up to find the LCD on the new lappy was dead. The PC still boots, and I can still see the files in the Public folder over the LAN, so I know it’s running, but with no video it’s pretty much worthless. Unfortunately I’d stored some very important files on it yesterday, and, since I planned to do a backup today I hadn’t made a copy of them. The files have to be retrieved before the PC goes back to ASUS for warranty repair.
Before I tore out the last of my hair out I tried plugging in an HDMI cable. Then I booted up and watched the video pop up on the TV “right out of the box”. In no time I was able to log right in and start a backup. Once the backup was done my curiosity got the better of me. When I looked at the Configuration window in Pavucontrol I saw a couple of options for directing output to HDMI. I selected one and then loaded up a movie. Lo and behold, sound and video… right out of the box.
I’m beginning to rethink my long affair with nvidia devices. This lowly Intel 3000 is pretty impressive. of course I’m not a gamer, but it does almost all I’d ever need it to do and with minimal frustration.
BTW: the new laptop is an ASUS X53e, and I put 12.1 on it with KDE 4.9. Every single component worked right out of the box! The only tweaking I had to do was to get the trackpad to disable during typing. Even Skype work with no fuss. Assuming the vendor makes good on his promise to exchange the PC for a new one as soon as I bring it in (I’m flying to the States and will find out next week), I’ll be very happy with this laptop despite the LCD failure.
As this is clearly a double post, I closed the other one.
But I have still doubts about this one. You posted this in Get technical help here > Multimedia.
It is a complete riddle to me what technical help you are seeking.
IMHO this should be in Community & Fun > General Chit-Chat.
If you can not convince me that you arre asking for technical help, I will move this there.
Very sorry. If you could delete the second post I would be grateful. We are in the middle of a Tropical Storm right now, and our Internet has been up and down all day. It looked for a while as if my first post had been lost (it didn’t show up on the forum for several minutes, so I posted the second one.)
But I have still doubts about this one. You posted this in Get technical help here > Multimedia.
It is a complete riddle to me what technical help you are seeking.
IMHO this should be in Community & Fun > General Chit-Chat.
If you can not convince me that you arre asking for technical help, I will move this there.
Please do move it. I debated which place to post and clearly made the wrong choice.
I’ve been around the forum for several years now and had never noticed that the path to the multimedia forum was
>Forum>English>Get Technical Help Here>Multimedia. I’ve always just clicked on a link that simply said “Multimedia”. Maybe I’m not the only one who’s made that mistake(?) Perhaps a minor edit to the forum home page could avoid this sort of misunderstanding in the future.
Some months ago I bought an HP dm1 netbook with an ATI/AMD Vision chipset (Radeon HD 6350 video IINM). Soon after installing oS 12.1 KDE4 4.7 in it I plugged the HDMI output to a digital TV. HD video and audio worked OOTB, no tweak necessary, no pavucontrol installed, nothing special. Very nice :).
OTOH nvidia’s vdpau is miles ahead of AMD (and of Intel from what I read) in terms of performance, and multimonitor mode works better in nvidia when you attach/detach monitors.
Yes of course. Intel is not the king of performance for sure but it’s the most hassle free when it comes to linux drivers and the performance is good enough for me
Forgot to include that ATI/AMD video is much more troublesome (for me) than nvidia. Usually installing/upgrading the proprietary nvidia blob is painless, but with AMD it’s always chancy.
And with intel you almost never need to install the proprietary blob as the opensource driver usually gives you the best performance from the hardware you can get.
