[mythtv-users] NVidia/overscan problem

[Dave Badia]

On Mon, Sep 23, 2013 at 12:58 PM, Jerry <mythtv at hambone.e4ward.com> wrote:

> On Mon, Sep 23, 2013 at 12:07 PM, Jay Ashworth <jra at baylink.com> wrote:
>
>> In other news, the new VGA card in my sis's box is a GeForce 210, which is
>> talking HDMI to her TV, a Philips 32pf7321.  Which only has one HDMI
>> input.  With no knobs in the setup menus.
>>
>> And -- as I'm told is common with NVidia cards, and not as much with ATI
>> ones -- it's doing two things I'm not happy about:
>>
>> 1) It overscans.  I may not be able to fix this on the TV, though I can
>> probbaly figure out a way to do so in Xorg -- although I'd prefer not to
>> have to jettison autoconfiguration entirely.  (Does anybody know how to
>> provide Xorg (1.12.3 from SUSE RPM) with *some* parameters to override
>> it's autodetection?)  Which leads directly into ...
>>
>> 2) It lies.  Since the TV is talking HDMI, it can tell X which resolutions
>> it knows how to support, over DDC (I gather), and *since it can downsample
>> 1080i to the 720p it actually displays*, that's one resolution it
>> supplies.
>>
>> And it's rescaler is garbage, and certainly not something I want between
>> X and my eyeballs.
>>
>> But I can't see any way to tell Xorg *not* to listen to that mode,
>> without building a complete manual config file (tree, since SuSE has
>> broken that up into a directory) -- indeed, most of the manual config
>> stuff seems to be falling fallow since autoconfig got as good as it
>> generally is.
>>
>> Anyone have any thoughts on these video issues?  I'm sort of assuming
>> that if I can fix the second one, I can also fix the first, but I already
>> tried putting a Monitor section in my 50-monitor.xorg.conf, and it seems
>> to be ignoring it.  Someone suggested something else to me last night
>> (suppling a Screen stanza instead) and I'm going to test that now, but
>> I don't know if it will help either.
>>
>
> I'm not sure how different you SUSE setup is from my Fedora setup, but the
> following steps work for me:
>
> Check out the second section on the wiki, entitled "With NVidia Cards and
> more recent nVidia drivers (greater than version 300)"
> http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Overscan#Making_MythTV_fit_the_screen_on_a_TV
>
> First, create a modeline for the desired resolution.  There is a link to
> the Ubuntu forums article on that page, but I'll put it here:
> http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1003099&page=2  It's very
> thorough.  It will take you a while, but it's worth it.  I'd recommend
> printing out that article and using it as a reference.  I also recommend a
> good cup of coffee.
>
> Then, use that resolution and do the overscan configuration in xorg.conf
> as well.  You need to be using the nVidia proprietary drivers.  It requires
> a bit of trial and error, but probably won't take more than a half hour to
> get right.  There is a link there to the official nVidia documentation on
> the subject.  I used the linked image on the page as my desktop background
> and tuned up my television.
>
> Your hard work should produce a working resolution that you can live with.
>
> Good luck,
> Jerry
>
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>
I'm a bit confused about the two links in this post, it seems like they're
both trying to accomplish the same thing.  The wiki article explains how to
adjust for overscan via trial and error.  The ubuntu link explains how to
create a custom modeline, starting with the data presented by the TV, then
"adjust the screen positioning".  The article doesn't explain why we are
adjusting, but one has to assume overscan since if you have a 1:1 pixel
mapping there is nothing to adjust.

Are people really doing both?  Seems like one or the other would be
sufficient.  After all, you can the proper HD modelines from the web:
http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/User_Manual:JudderFree  (halfway down the page)
Seems easier to just get the proper modeline from there and then use the
nvidia driver to compensate for overscan.

Dave
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