[mythtv-users] Changed monitors (not the TV) and now mythfrontend doesn't display right.

[A. F. Cano]

On Mon, Jun 07, 2021 at 09:47:57AM -0400, Peter Bennett wrote:
> 
> On 6/7/21 9:07 AM, Paul Harrison wrote:
> > Like John says thing have changed significantly in v31 and even more so
> > in current master. Not sure about v31 but in master you can select which
> > monitor you want MythTV to run on in the setup so probably don't need to
> > use --geometry.
> > 
> > 
> > Paul H.
> 
> All versions, including v31, can use mythfrontend settings -> appearance ->
> theme / screen settings -> Gui dimension to set the size and offset of your
> picture. I use this all the time, and it works fine.

On v 30 it's Advanced -> Setup -> Appearance -> Theme/Screen Settings ->
GUI Dimensions

I set the size to 1920 x 1080 but it wouldn't accept my offset (3840):
too big.  Still this didn't do it.  The GUI interface was sized
correctly but displaying any video still had the black bars on left and
right and it was stretched vertically.

I could only solve this by setting: Display on Screen: 2.  After that
the video displays correctly on the tv, but it has an unfortunate side
effect.  I can no longer start a frontend on screen 1 (mythfrontend
count starting at 0, my original 2, by my count the tv is on screen 3).

I used to be able to do (on screen 2 - my numbering)

mythfrontend -w -geometry 1280x720

to do all kinds of housekeeping, now (predictably) it goes and opens the
window on top of the other frontend running on the tv.

This brings up another issue I've had.  Since the frontend settings seem
to be global (they apply to all frontends running) where to direct the
sound is also global.  If I start the housekeeping frontend as shown
above, the sound still goes to the HDMI output of the tv.  It would be
nice if all these settings could be applicable on a per screen basis,
not globally.  I know I could probably start the housekeeping frontend
from a script that sets the sound and now the screen to start on (is this
possible for the screen number?) before the frontend proper is started,
but I haven't investigated how to do this yet.  The obvious attempt to
set -w 1 failed:

Boolean type options do not accept values:
    -w
Received '1' but unassociated arguments have not been enabled
mythfrontend version:  [v30.0] www.mythtv.org

This would be an easy way to direct on what screen to open the frontend.
It would override the global parameter.  Something similar could be done
to direct the sound output.  In my case: default speakers for the
frontend on screen 2 (my cound starting at 1) and HDMI for the TV.

I did notice that the above invocation of the frontend also had the
black sidebars and the vertical stretching even at that windowed lower
resolution, before I set the "Display on Screen: 2" parameter.  Somehow
the video display software appears to refer to the maximum height of the
current window (1200) even if the display area is only 1280x720.

I wonder if this has been fixed in v31 or above, I suppose I'll find out
when bullseye becomes stable and I upgrade.

> Peter

In any case, thank you for pointing out a path to a solution.  I now can
watch properly on the main frontend at least.

Augustine