[mythtv-users] Bad TV picture quality on an HDTV

[Matt Grommes]

Hi, I'm new to myth and thanks to Jarod's guide I've almost got 
everything set up, except for the main use of the system: regular TV. 
I've got a Toshiba HDTV that says its native modes are 720p and 1080i. 
After _much_ tweaking I finally got a useable desktop on 720p where I 
can see everything in KDE and in MythTV but my TV picture quality is 
terrible. I have a wintv 250 and digital cable through Comcast. When I 
plug the same svideo cable from the cable box into my TV, it's perfect. 
The picture in myth seems very pixellated and there's a lot of "banding" 
where colors touch each other. It's similar to a badly encoded mpeg or a 
small video clip stretched to full screen. Is the 1136x670 resolution of 
my desktop causing the TV to stretch or something? I've tried a lower 
800x480 540p resolution and it seems the same. I'm recording in 720x480 
with (I think) 4500 bit rate of encoding. I'm almost totally ignorant 
when it comes to X modelines and things so just getting the useable 
desktop at 720p was a feat. When I try a smaller 540p resolution a lot 
of the screen goes off the edges of the TV until I run nvidia-settings, 
then it shrinks the screen until it's like a 20" picture in the middle 
of my 32" TV. The nvidia-settings was how I finally got the 720p 
resolution to fit on the desktop. When I play a video or a DVD, it looks 
great. It's only TV that looks bad. Sorry for the rambling but I'm at 
the limits of my knowledge.

Any help would be _greatly_ apprecited. Thanks.