LCD TV Philips 32PFL5403D

This page describes my adventures of getting a LCD TV hooked up properly to a new PC. The PC was equiped with an NVIDIA Geforce 8500 GT card. It took me 2 days to find out what was happening and to fix the issue.

First of all: why going though all these troubles? Well: I want to view movies stored on the Dreambox on this PC. For this I need a browser and VLC. And of course a nice, big LCD TV.

As the PC was equipped with a NVIDIA Geforce 8500 GT card and I was used to setting up the required drivers on a Linux box, I assumed a flawless installation again. Not at all! I needed two, 2, days of struggling with the xorg.conf file, visiting forums, etc. to find out what was happening. Thanks to you guys out there and Google I found the solution.

The installation of the NVIDIA driver itself went perfect. However ... It appeared the xorg.conf file generated by the nvidia-xconfig tool was not correct. It took me quite a while to understand the reason for this. In browsing through the forums I learned that there is an exchange of capabilities between any monitor, so also the LCD TV and the PC, when the X-server is started. Typically the monitor identifies itself to the PC and informs the PC what its supported display resolutions are, part of this data is called the EDID. It turned out that the EDID data as provided by my LCD TV, an Philips 32PFL5403D/12 was/is bogus.

How did I learn about this? The typicall debug cycle I followed is to boot the PC into consolo mode and execute from the command-line, logged in as root:

1. Modify /etc/X11/xorg.conf
2. Start X using the startx command
3. Study /var/log/Xorg.0.log
4. Goto Step 1.

In the errorneous situation I found a message in /var/log/Xorg.0.log complaining about the EDID and stating the X-server would revert to the "nvidia-auto-select" mode. All in all, while debugging the 32" TV initially produced 800x600 pixels, produced only 640x400 pixels, started blinking, that is the desktop appeared on the TV then switched off again. Depending on the xorg-conf settings. Such a big screen with only 640x400 pixels on it. Can you imagine?

Key elements to fix the issue in xorg.conf were:

• Tell the X-server not to use EDID
• Create your own ModeLine for the resolution, for this look-up in the usermanual of the TV which resolutions are supported. The ModeLine itself can be Google'ed.
• Instruct the X-server to use this Modeline by the Options MetaModes and ExactModeTimingsDVI

Below the relevants parts of my xorg.conf are shown. The lines I had to add are shown in bold. If you remove the bold lines then the resulting xorg.conf file is close to the one generated by the nvidia-xconfig tool.

Section "Monitor"
  Identifier "Monitor0"
  VendorName "Philips"
  ModelName "32PFL5403D/12"
  HorizSync 15.0 - 70.0
  VertRefresh 48.0 - 62.0
  ModeLine "1360x768" 85.50 1360 1424 1536 1792 768 771 778 795 -hsync -vsync
  Option "DPMS"
  Option "UseEDID" "False"
EndSection

Section "Device"
  Identifier "Device0"
  Driver "nvidia"
  VendorName "NVIDIA Corporation"
  BoardName "GeForce 8500 GT"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
  Identifier "Screen0"
  Device "Device0"
  Monitor "Monitor0"
  DefaultDepth 24
  Option "ExactModeTimingsDVI" "TRUE"
  Option "TwinView" "0"
  Option "metamodes" "1360x768_60 +0+0"
  SubSection "Display"
    Depth 24
  EndSubSection
EndSection

Yes, yes! The 4 additional lines in xorg.conf are worth 2 days of effort. Use KD4 and make your 32" LCD TV display some marvellous desktop effects.