Linux on Laptops & Notebooks with Video Ports

The Linux status of the laptop models reported below, is changing and improving. Therefore, if a laptop is reported as "unsupported" you should give it a try. Why is this survey valuable though: To encourage people which want to buy a "working" stated machine (remember: no guarantees) and to collect technical information (what video ports are used) about different models. At ByteSex you may find neccessary drivers and tools.

Compatibility Check

There are different ways how to detect, which video port is used in your laptop:

from the official specs
from the output of lspci

Survey of Laptops with Video/TV-Out Ports

Manufacturer	Model	Linux Status	Annotations	Contributor/ Source
Apple	Powerbook G3 - Lombard	unknown	SVIDEO out	<Bernhard Reiter> bernhard_at_intevation.de
ACER	Extensa 712TEV	unknown	none	own research
Actebis	Targa Premium 133C	unknown	NTSC	own research
Apple/Macintosh	7x00/8x00 Power Macintoshes	video input driver in beta test Video4Linux	none	Video4Linux
DELL	Latitude CPt	unknown	SVIDEO (PAL/NTSC) out port and a ZV in port	Jan Marius Evang <jmariuse_at_ifi.uio.no>
DELL	Latitude CPt S500GT	unknown	"SVIDEO output, PAL and NTCS, ZV port, .. also comes with an adapter cable for CompositVideo output."	Johan Winas <johan.winas_at_isg.se>
Hewlett-Packard	Omnibook 7100 and 7150	S-Video output (NTSC or PAL)	ZV port	Dhananjay Joshi <dj_joshi_at_yahoo.com>
IBM	Thinkpad 600X	unknown	ZV port	own research
IBM	Thinkpad A20P, A21P	"I think it's a standard feature of the ATI Rage video chipset. Other current Thinkpads may have it too."	S-Video in, out	phr-2001_at_nightsong.com
Oki	OkiBook D266	unknown	NTSC/PAL Video Out " These laptops are really AsusTek's P6300 powered up by Oki."	Miguel Armas <kuko_at_dis.ulpgc.es>
Olivetti	Xtrema Series	unknown	Video in (ZV Port)	own research
Panasonic	CF-25 MK III	unknown	ZV port	own research
Sharp	MN-6350	unknown	video I/O Trident Cyber 9385, with bt817 chip	<Carlos Collao V.> ccollao_at_accessnova.cl
SONY	VAIO PCG-808	unknown	NTSC/PAL video port	Chris McDonough
Toshiba	Tecra 750CDT	unknown	none	own research

Annotations

If your laptop doesn't support a video port by itself you may try an according PCMCIA card, for instance the IBM Smart Capture video capture card. A driver is contributed by <oka_at_nanotsu.kobe-u.ac.jp> Koji Okamura . See also this README .

Abbrevations:

NTSC (North America Television Standard C.) - North America (and Japan at a different sub carrier) television standard. The oldest standard at 1954 (-525 line).
PAL (Phase Alternating Line) - European television standard. First used in the UK and Germany in 1967 (625 line).
SECAM (Système Électronique pour Couleur avec Mémoire) - Typical French politically-inspired system - a beast of a signal. Have also seen it referred to as: "Something Essentially Contrary to the American Method" "SEcond Colour Always Magenta!"
ZV (Zoomed Video) - A separate bus for high speed connection of video and audio data to the graphic and sound processor. Reduces CPU load by bypassing it.

Software

dvgrab

dvgrab saves the video data from a digital video (DV) camcorder into an AVI file. It detects NTSC or PAL without command line options.

w3cam

w3cam is a small and fast CGI program to retrieve images from a video4linux device. It supports PPM, PNG and JPEG as output format. You can select size, quality, input device (TV, S-Video, etc.) and more.

atitvout

atitvout is a tool for enabling/disabling the TV out connector and switching of TV standards (PAL, NTSC, etc.) of ATI Rage graphics boards from within Linux on IA32. It is especially useful on ATI Rage Mobility boards, which boot up in NTSC mode by default and need to be switched to PAL for use with German TV sets. Radeon and Rage 128 are supported too, but your mileage may vary.

Linux Video Studio

Linux Video Studio is a GUI written in GTK to capture video from an external source through an MJPEG-compatible CODEC board: the Pinnacle DC10(+), the Iomega Buz, Matrox Marvel G200/G400/G-runner series, and Linux Media Labs 33. It can do simple frame-by-frame editing (add/delete/move/split scenes and scene trimming) on the recorded movies. The resulting movies can be played back to the output of the video-capture device or can be encoded into MPEG movies.

Description	Type	Distributor
S-VHS cable	MDINST4-MDINST4	segor electronics #02409
audio/video cable	3xCIST-3xCIST rt,ws,ge	segor electronics #31459
SCART-Cinch Adapter	3xCINCH + SVHS Video/Audio + I/O switch	segor electronics #2808

Other Resources

GATOS (the General ATI TV and Overlay Software) is an effort to create standard drivers for all currently unsupported features of ATI video cards, specifically TV features.
Hardware-HOWTO .
Xi-Graphics provides commercial X-Servers, which support TV-Out features.
How to build a S-Video to Composite Video (RCA jack) converter cable .
TV-Out HOWTO for nVidia graphic cards (in German)

Credits

Jason France <jason_at_orb.cx>

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