Hey ppl, I'm not sure if anyone has brought this up but I haven't seen it anywhere. On some 1080i movies or shows that are not wide screen/HD I get a black nothing on both the left and right sides of the video and strange white lines that appear on the top.
Here is an example:

Is there a setting in MythTV that can remove these things or am I asking for something that doesn't exist yet

_________________
Backend: HP NetServer LT 6000r U3; 6 700Mhz Xeon CPUs; 3GB PC133 ECC; LSI Ultra160 SCSI 4 18GB 10kRPM striped system; 7200RPM 160GB recordings; Ubuntu-server 7.04; HDHomeRun box.
Frontend: A64 3000+; 512MB DDR; Hauppauge grey; knoppmyth PXE/NFS.

Well if the signal is not widescreen then you are suppost to get the black boxes on the left/right. Otherwise the picture would be all streched and distorted. If you want to strech/zoom the picture your TV might have that feature.

As for the strange white lines at the top, they are always there. Just normally the TV's overscan hides them from your view. If you really don't like them you can either adjust the overscan on your videocard (you forgot to tell us what that is), or adjust the overscan of your TV in the hidden service menu.

I am pretty sure the "strange white lines" at the top are the closed captioning data for analog transmissions. Since non-HD programs like this are probably just analog recordings getting converted to digital, the closed captioning lines are being converted too.

Thanks for the help guys! My overscan setting on the video card is .6 and on videos that fill the screen the left and right sides of the video get cut off a little bit and the top and bottom have very small black lines because of the overscan so I dont want to increase it.
Is there a way to just increase the vertical size of the video card output?
As for the large black left and right sides I set it to default to the "Fill" mode that causes the "analog" recording to fill the screen.

On another note, would you gys say that HDTV broadcasting is terrible cus they could do a much better job at broadcasting shows/movies. It's not just the white lines on the top but some times in movies they send a 5.1 DD stream but only use the 2 front channels! And they some times forget that their broadcasting a HD show/movie and switch it to SD for a few minutes and back... I dont know how your broadcasters are but mine suck!

_________________
Backend: HP NetServer LT 6000r U3; 6 700Mhz Xeon CPUs; 3GB PC133 ECC; LSI Ultra160 SCSI 4 18GB 10kRPM striped system; 7200RPM 160GB recordings; Ubuntu-server 7.04; HDHomeRun box.
Frontend: A64 3000+; 512MB DDR; Hauppauge grey; knoppmyth PXE/NFS.

Yes there is. In the playback settings menu inside MythTV you can control the vertical and horizontal overscan independently. You can also shift the video up, down, left or right.

My broadcasters don't do those stupid things, thank god!

My brodcasters don't do them because they don't broadcast in HD at all. Thats right there are still some places in the USA with out HD, and I live in the largest city in the state. So be carful what you complain about. It could always be worse.

Thanks jake, a vertical overscan setting of 1 was enough to remove all of those white lines but a few pixels during playback which is much better.
However, it doesn't increase the vertical size of the video card output to fill the top and bottom of my TV, it just stretches the video playback.

Ryan, your right, it could be worse, we could all be using black and white TVs!

_________________
Backend: HP NetServer LT 6000r U3; 6 700Mhz Xeon CPUs; 3GB PC133 ECC; LSI Ultra160 SCSI 4 18GB 10kRPM striped system; 7200RPM 160GB recordings; Ubuntu-server 7.04; HDHomeRun box.
Frontend: A64 3000+; 512MB DDR; Hauppauge grey; knoppmyth PXE/NFS.