[mythtv-users] NVidia/overscan problem

[Jerry]

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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