[mythtv-users] Problems with very high res display

[John Patrick Poet]

On Tue, 3 Aug 2004, John Goerzen wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I finally was able to connect my HDTV to my MythTV box via a DVI-to-HDMI
> cable.  The 30" HDTV unit nicely supports EDID, and reports 1920x540,
> 720x480, and 640x480.  I have all three working from X.
>
> I would, of course, prefer to drive the TV at 1920x540.  This, I think,
> would especially be useful when watching DVDs or other sources that
> aren't evenly scalable to 720x480 (or sources that have more vertical
> resolution.)
>
> However, I have two problems with this:
>
> 1. The MythTV GUI is *SLOW* at high resolutions.  Just using my arrow
> keys to navigate is slow, and when it has to render a new set of icons,
> there's a 1-2 second delay.  I have observed this on every machine I've
> run MythTV on, including both nVidia and ATI graphics cards.
>
> 2. When run at 1920x540, the TV screen (in "Watch TV" or while viewing
> recorded programs) is rendered as a small box at the center top of the
> TV.  That is, most of the TV screen is black, but there's this box that
> has my picture in it.  That's annoying, and the only way I could find to
> solve this is to run my system at 720x480.  Incidentally, when run at
> that resolution, the display works fine with all recordings, even though
> my "Low Quality" settings record at a lower resolution.  So it seems
> that the system is capable of scaling; it's just choosing not to for
> some reason.
>
> Any help would be appreciated on either of those.
>
> Here are my system details:
>  * ATI Radeon 9600 with ATI's fglrx drivers, XFree86 4.3.0,
>    Overlay support explicitly enabled
>  * AMD AthlonXP 2200+, 256MB RAM
>  * Debian testing
>  * MythTV 0.15.1, using the Debian packages
>  * TV is a 30" Philips CRT model 30PW8402.  I am using the DVI output
>    on my Radeon 9600 and a DVI-to-HDMI cable to drive that unit.  Thus
>    it is getting a pure digital signal from the PC.
>
> Things I have tried:
>
>  * xvinfo behaves normally and xv appears to be enabled like it should
>    be.
>
>  * Reducing the size of the GUI in the setup does speed things up, at
>    the cost of having an ugly background on part of the screen.


Doug Larrick added an option to the [Appearance] menu, which might help
you.  I believe it is the third screen in.  There is a check-box at the very
top of the screen -- once enabled other options appear on the screen which
allow you to designate different GUI and video resolutions.

With this option enabled everything is done full-screen -- just the display
resolution is changed.  Any display resolution (modeline) defined in your X
config file can be used.

I am working on enhancing what Doug did, to allow different display
resolutions based on the video resolution being rendered, but I am still
testing it.

John