This may seem a little odd, but it beats reading & feeding the trolls:
My Nvidia card's S-Video out jack is limited to 1024x768. It has two DVI-I DualLink (NOT the dual monitor DVI standard) jacks besides. The chances that HDMI will work at 1080* are next to nill, IMHO, given the HDCP requirements and the fact that I'm asking this here and not in some Windows group. Still, though, it may work alright at a lower resolution. My current config is as follows:
Video card - LEADTEK PX8600GT 256MB w/the following lspci output: 02:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation GeForce 8600 GT (rev a1) DISPLAY=:0.0: Samsung 225BW w/DVI connector running at its native 1680x1050 resolution (16:10) DISPLAY=:0.1: Crappy little Acer AL1917W running at its native 1440x900 (16:9) - Lacks a DVI port, so it's connected via a DVI-->VGA adapter DISPLAY=:0.2: Hitachi 42PD9500TA 42 Multi-System HDTV Plasma TV connected via an S-Video port & a 1/8in audio-->RCA audio jack
Note that the Hitachi HDTV lacks a VGA port (le sigh) but does have two HDMI ports and multiple S-Video and composite out jacks. The Hitachi will plainly support 720* resolutions, which are pretty much the same as the native res of the Acer monitor. Running over the S-Video jack, however, there's no way to feed it anything other than 1024x768. This means that if I play a DVD or whatever through this jack I've always got to have every media player I use explicitly set to re-jigger the 16:9 content into whatever the ratio is to get it to render as 16:9 at a 4:3 resolution. No massive quality loss/the quality is still quite good, but it seems like there must be a cleaner way to set this up, all the same:
The monitor is effectively useless as a third monitor, due to its distance from my primary and secondary displays. It would be much, much better if I had a nice, neat projector-room style setup where the Acer and the Hitachi show the same stuff, without having to give up the other monitor. I'm perfectly willing to give up sound, which I'd have to if I used a DVI-->HDMI adapter, as the HDMI adapters don't have RCA audio-in jacks. My TV requires that you use HDMI as the sound input on the HDMI video input sources, but I've got a decent stereo I can jack into, too. No big loss.
Is there anything I can do to make this setup work in such a way that the smaller Acer display is a cloned image of the TV's screen without having to run completely different X sessions? If not, is there a way to do it without that caveat?
Any suggestions?
Thanks, Sean Crago Kathmandu
PS: I'm hesitant to replace the relatively new 8600-series video card at the moment/without a local buyer, but I'm perfectly willing to buy DVI-->HDMI adapters or whatever if I thought they'd work. I've shopped around for a DVI---->DVI&VGA splitter, but it seems like the only ones on the market will drive one or the other, but not both simultaneously. The VGA compatibility pins in DVI are apparently disabled, at least in most cases, when the DVI pins are in use, again, from what I've read - Haven't plunked down money to try to disprove that, but it seems like a silly waste if I can't find evidence that someone's gotten it working somehow.
PSS: I can get mail/UPS/whatever forwarded here, so unless you're proposing a >70lbs solution or one bigger than a small coffee-table, it's not a problem to order it.