Rudolf Cornelissen (whom we interviewed here recently) has updated his Matrox Driver page with some good news. Basic TV Out support has been added to the G450 and the G550. Let me post his update for your voyeuristic pleasure:

"Yes! We have basic G450/G550 TVout support! It actually works over here... The code is a bit of a mess because of all the testing I had to do, but it's getting there. Here are some details on the preliminary results:

The TV output on G450/G550 works with CRTC2 setup in interlaced mode, while the TVout chip is working in slave mode. This means you will love it for video playback use! The vertically non-scaled output is looking very sharp. I can actually read the tiny words in a terminal window while 1024x480 output is enabled.

The bad news however is that for desktop use this setup is not perfect. An extra buffer needs to be used, and the 2D engine needs to be instructed to downscale the desktop picture onto TV. This is not implemented yet BTW. Of course we will loose some of the sharpness because of this scaling: but that can never be helped, no matter what downscaling setup you have. This does not apply for the videomodes however because they are unscaled and output 1:1...

Anyway; Stay tuned!"

Nice, very nice. I'm sure those of you out there who own these cards are drooling right now, asking when he'll post the updated driver. Well.. those who wait.. despair... But stay tuned as we bring you it's status update. Thanks to Rene for the heads up on this one.

On a side note, sorry for the downtime today, I saw a few tears on some folks' faces.. no fear, DaaT is here.