The atyfb driver currently in the 2.6 kernel series doesn't support TV-out abilities on videocards/motherboards that have TV-out ports and know how to use them properly. Attempts to use TV-out when using the atyfb framebuffer driver here has only resulted in white lines flying across the screen. The current workaround is to use the vesafb driver at an appropriate lower resolution, but that means that framebuffer is unaccelerated for the most part, and somewhat hinders the performance of framebuffer applications. And on the 333Mhz or less systems usually sporting this chipset, every drop of performance is absolutely crucial.
Just discovered another reason: the VESA standard (and thus vesafb driver) only supports standard monitor modes -- nonstandard modes and timings (think NTSC/PAL) require a more direct video driver.
Reassigning to kernel folks. Send back to xfree@ if you disagree.
We're sorry, but we are not going to fix atyfb, that's the job of its kernel maintainer. You should probably contact the guys on fbdev-devel (linux-fbdev-devel@lists.sourceforge.net) mailing list and ask them for support for TV-out capabilities.