[mythtv-users] hardware questions for HD to SD playback

[Dale Pontius]

Johnny wrote:
>> I'd consider carefully.  It's a LOT of overscan, enough to take off
>> practically the whole taskbar on the top/bottom of the screen, and even
>> more on the sides.
> 
> The amount of overscan depends on your TV. Many TVs will have no
> overscan, while for others it can be significant. Since I only use
> mine for mythtv I just used the built screen adjustments and I don't
> notice the difference.  I do everything else via VNC and SSH so it
> doesn't matter. The major boost in picture quality that VDPAU gave me
> was well worth the loss of overscan adjustment. But that is just my
> opinion. I guess I still hope that nvidia will fix it eventually.

Other people have said this, but for me it doesn't hold water.  Others
blame the NTSC spec, itself.  Maybe so, but there remains this:

A wide range of hardware works just fine with my TV:
VCRs, DVD players, games consoles
More to the point...
A Thinkpad with S3 Savage graphics
A Thinkpad with ATI graphics
A Mac laptop

None of these other systems, including the 3 laptops, had overscan
problems that would make an ordinary desktop unusable.  (That includes
taskbar on bottom or top of the screen, or icons on left or right
edges.) The nVidia card does.  Furthermore, the nVidia driver recognizes
this, and used to have an overscan slider in the nvidia-settings
program.  There is an overscan adjustment in xorg.conf - it just doesn't
work on 8000+ GPUs.

One could hope that nVidia will fix it eventually, there seem to be
rumblings that they have fixed it on their Windows drivers.  From what
I've read on nvnews.net, nVidia seemed to be hoping that the problem
would just go away, by everybody buying hdtv sets.

Dale