Hi,

I was just going to ask the people who use a widescreen tv what they do with their xorg. Do you Leave it alone and use the tv to adjust the picture or do you use the displaysize in xorg? or do you have another method.

To clarrify-
I have seen a couple of different posts and I had been using Display size to get widescreen as per:
[url]http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/Aspect_ratio[/url]

But i was doing some reading and found this in the wiki:
[url]http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/XorgConfMonitorSectionForTV[/url]

It sais "[quote]don't try to get a wide-screen resolution working with TV out; just keep the standard 4x3 Aspect ratio resolutions, and use a wide-screen theme and the wide-screen button on the Remote[/quote]" (im not sure if that means the remote for mythtv or the remote for your tv ie. Mythtv aspect ration or the tv's).

What do people out there do?

I have a Sharp Aquos that is 16:9 with a resolution of 1366x768. I set xorg for that resolution.

Note that this depends on HOW you have your MythTV box connected to your TV set.

If you are connecting it to your TV as if the TV is a computer monitor--you're using VGA or DVI and connecting directly to the VGA/DVI output of your video card--then Cecil is correct and you set the resolution you want (and that your TV can do) in Xorg. This is the best way of connecting the MythTV box to the TV, particularly if you have a HDTV.

(Side question to Cecil: do the Nvidia drivers now support resolutions that aren't divisible by 8? I was never able to get 1366x768 due to that limitation, but that was a while ago.)

That second wiki link you sent is discussing connecting via the TV Out capability of a video card. They're correct when they say that connections made via composite or S-video are all sending a 4:3 signal; there's no provision to send a "true" 16:9 image.

It's like the situation with DVDs and DVD players. All DVDs, whether the program on them is widescreen or 4:3, have the same resolution video on them (in NTSC-land, it's 720x480 pixels). There are flags on the video, though, to specify whether the program should be shown as widescreen or 4:3. Widescreen material is squeezed horizontally to fit the 4:3 resolution on disc, then stretched out again to fit a 16:9 set, as long as you've set your DVD player so that it "knows" it's connected to a 16:9 set.

The latter. It makes everything "just work" without having to
constantly futz with the TV settings.

That sure makes sense to me.

I think that's nuts. If you tell MythTv that you've got a
widescreen display, it knows what to do and will automatically
properly pillarbox 4:3 source material. If MythTv thinks
you've got a 4:3 display, then it'll letterbox widescreen
programming (which throws away source material by scaling it
down), and then you have to manually zoom the TV to get the
screen filled at the proper aspect ratio. However, I'm using a
VGA connection instead of "TV out" as is mentioned in the
posting you quoted. Perhaps that makes a difference, but
AFAICT, using TV out would make the resolution lost due to
scaling even worse.

I guess if you don't mind having to manually set both the TV
and Myth's aspect ratios every time you watch something, you
might be able to get decent results from a MythTv system with a
misconfigured aspect ratio. I don't really see the point when
it's trivial to properly configure the aspect ratio, and doing
so results in playback that works right without constant user
intervention to manually set aspect ratio and zoom on both the
MythTv box and the TV...

Thanks for that,

Im not sure whether to put solved on the top cause I now I understand why there are different methods.

Now my question is whether i should continue to connect my crt widscreen tv to my computer through the component out on the video card or should I be getting one of the following adapters
1. dvi to rca or
2. vga to rca or
3. dvi to svideo
4. vga to svideo

Do you get loss of picture quality using a convertor?

What video card are you using that supplies component out? I have seen composite, S-Video, DVI and some newer ones that provide HDMI-out, but I've not run into one with component out. That would help with one of my frontends...

sorry, that was a mistake meant to write composite.

I re-read that second wiki link that discussed what to do when using a TV-out. It's really poorly written but I think ultimately it's correct.

* If your video card has a TV-out, use S-video to connect the video card to the TV. Image quality is considerably better than composite.

* Do whatever setup you need to do to Xorg or whatever to get your TV-out working. Note that the resolutions for TV-out are all 4:3... 640x480, 800x600, 1024x768. That is correct and as it should be!

* Select a widescreen theme in MythTV. MythTV will (according to the wiki) horizontally squeeze the 16:9 theme into the 4:3 output resolution. This is the same technique used with anamorphic DVDs.

* On the TV set, set that input to display at 16:9 (different TVs call it different things). This will undo the squeezing done in the step above and the theme should look OK. (If you selected a regular 4:3 theme and displayed it on a 16:9 TV like this, everything would look elongated.)

The catch is, this will work fine for the MythTV menus, but not for 4:3 recordings. They will all look horizontally stretched. You could try toggling through various widescreen settings in MythTV playback (press W on your keyboard) and see if one of them fixes things.

Here's a better discussion of aspect ratios on the wiki, including some things to try at the bottom of the page:

http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/Aspect_ratio

If your tv only has composite inputs and svideo inputs, then svideo would provide a somewhat better picture. If your video card doesn't have svideo outputs, the best route to take would probably be to get a video card that does have svideo out, instead of a converter cable. A card can be had for less than $50.

You may also be satisfied with what you have. Svideo will run your tv at the same horizontal and vertical frequencies as composite will, but the svideo signal is sharper and will have more apparent horizontal resolution. In a perfect system, you should be able to see around 700 lines (lines running from top to bottom like this: lllllll but 700 of 'em) before they start to blur into each other, instead of about 420 lines in a composite signal. If you are recording SD at 480 x 480, you may not see much difference, but if you record SD at 720 x 480, you should see a better picture. And if you are recording HD, it should look better too, even though the video card will be down converting it to 480i for your svideo tv.

If you have a wide screen crt tv, it might be an Enhanced Definition TV, EDTV (as opposed to HDTV), in which case it may also be capable of 480p, but then it should have component video inputs, in addition to svideo and composite.
Ziggy

My PNY nVidia 6200 AGP card has component out. I used it that way for quite a few months in fact.

Ahhh, is that what is referred to as the "HDTV-out breakout pod" ? I wasn't aware that was a component output.

Thanks, I'll have to take a closer look around.