[mythtv-users] Problems with very high res display

[John Goerzen]

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.

Thanks,

John