[mythtv-users] theme for anamorphic widescreen TV

[Peter Schachte]

Hi all,

I've searched gossamer threads and have found some discussion of this
topic, but no real conclusions.

I've been looking for a good myth theme for my PAL SD widescreen TV.
The resolution is 720 x 576, so the *pixel* aspect ratio is 5:4, but
the pixels are non-square, and the visual aspect ratio is 16:9.  I've
been using the Iulius theme, and it looks OK, but the text all looks
very fat and it doesn't fit much text on the wide screen, so the ends
of titles and descriptions often get elided.

Following Michael T. Dean's suggestion on this list, I put
"DisplaySize 259 146" in the Monitor section of my xorg.conf file,
making X think the screen is 70 x 100 dpi.  This works well.  I've
also tried "DisplaySize 182 102", which makes X think the screen is
100 x 143 dpi, but that makes the fonts much too big.  I even tried
forcing 100 x 100 dpi on the command line when launching X, but that
didn't help.

I naively expected when I got the dpi set right, I could just use a
widescreen theme to get Myth to take advantage of the wide screen.  I
tried the project grayhem-wide theme, but it doesn't work very well
for me.  It's designed with certain expectations for how much text
will fit across the screen, and they just don't hold on an anamorphic
widescreen TV.  So rather than fitting more text on the wide screen,
widescreen themes truncate text just as much as 4:3 themes, if not
more.

So if I modify a widescreen theme by substituting a font that's
exactly like the intended font but horizontally squeezed to 70% of its
width, would that then look correct?  Could I do that with a
non-widescreen theme?  Can anyone recommend such a condensed font?

Or would I do better with a square-pixel screen resolution for the
myth frontend (and get the nvidia driver to scale it for me?), and
fall back to 720x576 for displaying video?  If so, how do I do that?
Or does anyone with a PAL widescreen SD TV have a better or easier
solution?

I'm running myth 0.19 using an nvidia 5200 card and x.org 6.8.2.

-- 
Peter Schachte              Most people would sooner die than think, in fact
schachte at cs.mu.OZ.AU        they do so.
www.cs.mu.oz.au/~schachte/      -- Bertrand Russell 
Phone: +61 3 8344 1338