HTPC Overscan Problem Eliminated
Ever since we moved in and bought the big TV for the home theater, I've wanted one thing: a HTPC connected at full screen. I tried a Mac mini and discovered the pain of trying to get computers and HDTV's to get along. Eventually, the screen cropping (along with the Mac not wanting to cooperate with the blended Windows/Linux Samba network and lack of a usable interface from the couch with just a remote) led to me ditching it for an XP Media Center Edition PC.
Of course, the new HTPC had the same overscan/cropping issues, but none of the other problems. And, with MediaPortal configured to adjust for the overscan and the MCE remote, everything else was OK. I occasionally messed with the Powerstrip software, hoping to get the overscan issue resolved. However, messing with Powerstrip is a serious pain and requires you to know scan rates for your TV and other such information that's not foremost on the writers of manuals for TV's, who are more concerned with informing you how you can change the channel.
Then, a few weeks ago, even the things that worked started getting flaky and I decided to do a rebuild on it and see if I could stabilize it. I actually also took a stab at putting Ubuntu/MythTV on it along the way to great disaster (Ubuntu no-likey the Radeon X300 video card in it), so XP MCE 2005 went back on. Of course, that involved actually tracking down a physical MCE CD-ROM set, since Dell didn't ship one with this thing, etc., etc..
However, all of that pales in comparison to the final result.
See, when I got MCE installed and wireless drivers installed so I could get the *rest* of the drivers, I also grabbed the Catalyst software that came with the drivers for the Radeon X300. I just figured it was prudent to have all of it around and, like most OEM hardware software, it'd suck and I'd disable it after everything was working.
However, I noticed that it had a chunk of the configuration related to HDTV. Lo, and behold, ATI is now providing a way right from their own drivers to crop the screen. So, last night, I finally reached my goal. I have a non-cropped, fullscreen Windows desktop on my 52" TV.
It's running at some screwy resolution like 1740×940, but it fits the screen exactly and doesn't have the headache-inducing flicker on the desktop (the media software was always fine) that it used to. Things are nice and sharp and I'm really looking forward to correcting other little things that bugged me.
- I bought a copy of XP Pro to put on it. I want to be able to have the media experience running and do a Remote Desktop connection to move files around, etc. without having to log off the TV's view.
- Creating a user specifically for running the MediaPortal stuff. I'd been running that, as well as all kinds of other stuff as part of the same account. By creating an account specifically for running the "couch" view, I can customize the icons, shortcuts, etc. to work best from the couch without limiting myself for other tasks the machine needs to do.
