[mythtv-users] overscan problems with nvidia 8400 GS

Johnny jarpublic at gmail.com
Mon Jul 6 13:52:25 UTC 2009


> I've been studying this for some time now as I also enjoy the overscan problem.  While mythtv can fix it for mythtv it does not fix
> it for the desktop.
>
> If consumer / users lobby their retailers and higher up the chain some more appropriate and permanent fixes might come our way.
>
> The question has been asked which NVIDIA cards have the problem e.g. the 8400 has been "named" in the subject.  As best I can tell
> it is not a card model problem, they all share the same "problem" but not of their making.  Lets get the root of the problem fixed.
>
> I look forward to hearing comments in response to the tortise's view of things.

It is true that overscan is caused by the TV and not the video card,
however, the problem of displaying stuff from a computer on a TV is
shared by the TV and the video card. In the case of SD TVs, they were
never intended to be hooked up to a computer and so it is unreasonable
to hope for them to fix this issue. So in my opinion, if Nvidia
provides a TV out option they do have some responsiblity to help me
display stuff correctly on that TV (especially since overscan is
standard in many many TVs).

Also for most older TVs it will be more than a firmware fix. The
overscan is probably set in hardware rather than software. Also the
reason people are focusing on Nvidia is that the ability to fix
overscan was available in all of their cards for many years. It is
only recently since 8xxxx and above that the overscan setting was
removed. I imagine the hardware that supported the feature changed and
they just haven't got around the rewriting the code for the newer
hardware, because as you mentioned there are other higher priority
things to be done first. However, a friend confirmed for me that he
can adjust overscan with his 8800 on Windows. So it seems that it is
only the Linux driver that hasn't been updated with this feature. It
seems much more likely that a single video card maker will re-enable a
feature in their new cards than getting a whole myriad of TV
manufacturers to redesign their hardware and provide firmware updates
for older sets. So for those of us with this issue on our existing
sets, Nvidia providing a fix is really the only reasonable option.


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