[mythtv-users] HD: desparate, grasping at straws

[Greg Woods]

On Mon, 2006-05-29 at 14:36 -0700, Marco Nelissen wrote:

> It's entirely possible that it only accepts 1080i on the HDMI input, but
> not on the VGA input. You might want to check the manual.

Thank you very much for that suggestion. It was a great help.

The manual is, of course, content-free on this subject. All it says is
that the native resolution of the TV is 1024x768. In other threads on
this list, I have read that this is fairly typical. Few TV's are
actually 1920x1080 native resolution.  So it never occurred to me that
the resolution accepted by the VGA port would be limited. However, that
does appear to be the case. I first changed the Windows NVIDIA driver to
start displaying through the HDMI port, and went to work on PowerStrip
again. It is now possible to produce a configuration with 1920x1080
resolution that has the scan rates exact (33.75 horiz, 60.00 vertical).
I got the Linux modeline out of this and tried it in xorg.conf.
Progress! It actually does produce a signal that the TV believes is
1080i on the HDMI input. I still have quite a bit of work to do though.
The image I get has the X screen in a 4:3 window with the gray bars on
the side, even though it is a 1080i image. My attempt to use mplayer to
play an HD recording on this screen completely locked up the system and
I had to push the reset button to recover. Even logging in via ssh and
killing mplayer didn't do it. On a regular 1024x768 screen through the
VGA output, it plays the recording fine, but of course in a 16:9 window
within the 4:3 X screen, and it's not real HD. But at least I am at a
point now where I could go back to the HD-HOWTO's and maybe make some
further progress. Once I get this done, I'll have to post *my* modeline
on the Wiki so the next person with this TV doesn't have to go through
all this.

> However, since the panel's native resolution is 1024x768, you could also
> just pick that resolution, and let mythtv scale and deinterlace as needed.

Can you actually do this and get a good picture? Sounds like it would be
pretty CPU-intensive.

--Greg