It may be old news to some, but I just found out that xrandr and S-video are working
beautifully in the latest radeon driver. Using Gentoo's package
(x11-drivers/xf86-video-ati-6.7.197), my Thinkpad T43, with a built-in Mobility Radeon X300,
can now do more video layout tricks in Linux than Windows lets me do. I learned about the
TV-out capability here:
http://www.x.org/wiki/radeonTV
And here's a lot of info about the latest xrandr:
http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Xorg_RandR_1.2
It's obvious that great things are happening to X. Thank you, guys.