Hi,
I'm new to myth and have managed to get everything running now & receiving tv no problem.

I have a hauppage nova-t & a nvidia 5200 tvout connected via a composite to scart cable to an oldish 28" non widescreen tv.
I'm using a slightly changed (to PAL/composite) sample XF86Config-4.nvidiatvout

My problem is that while the myth interface appears on the whole screen, when I try to watch most tv channels eg bbc1, bbc2 they are appearing in widescreen with large black borders at the top and bottom of the screen.
Apart from some channels eg ITV3 which appear in the full screen fine so I reckon there's no overscan type problem.

I would like to be able to watch all programmes using the whole of my screen, ideally while still recording in widescreen. If I can't record in widescreen though that's no big deal I suppose.

I've been tweaking with various settings and have searched the boards/wiki but without success.

Anybody have any idea how I can solve this problem?

thanks,
Charlie

Have you tried the various zoom modes? I use Zoom Fill which takes the centre 4:3 section of 16:9 content and displays it full screen. In australia on DVB, they don't broadcast any 4:3 content. If the original is 4:3 it is broadcast as 16:9 with black bars at the sides.

thanks for the reply,
how exactly do you mean zoom fill? If you mean on the tv, I've tried various buttons on my remote which change the screen but just squash it more.
Is there a setting in a config file somewhere ?

thanks a lot!

Zoom is an option during myth playback. Im not sure if "Fill" was available in mythtv 0.18.1, but it is on 0.19.
Press W to cycle through the various zoom options. You can also set a default somewhere in the myth setup menus. I default mine to Fill.

thanks, that's great I'll try that tonight when I get home, cheers

You can do as suggested, BUT that will just zoom ALL programs so you'll end up with some of them being the wrong aspect ratio. What you really want is to tell myth that you have a widescreen TV, so Widescreen broadcasts appear in Wide and 4:3 appear with black borders left and right.

Theoretically adding ' -monitoraspect 16:9 ' to the mplayer command line for 'VideoDefaultPlayer' would normally be what you should use. BUT I'm not sure it works properly all the time in MythTV as Myth may be doing something weird OR it is not correctly detecting the anamorphic nature of some streams. I also have this problem but it's on a long list.

thanks happy talk, but i'm actually trying to do the opposite:

i've got a non-widescreen tv & I want to display (what I think are) widescreen broadcasts from bbc etc on my whole screen without the black borders at the top & bottom.
Other channels are ok at the moment -eg itv3 so I don't want to zoom them if they're not broadcast in widescreen. Does that make sense?

Yeah that makes sense, and I suspect that is what the "Fill" option is for. It will zoom in on widescreen content and leave 4:3 content as is. All we get in australia on DVB is 16:9, so I cant confirm it for you, but that would make sense.

This is how the BBC Broadcast on UK DVB, BUT many other channels if broadcasting 4:3 send out an MPEG2 without the anamorphic flag set. Some channels are totally 4:3 and some change on the fly between the 2. So a Scart TV will flick between the two if it recognises the widescreen pin voltage.

In the OP's case I guess he wants to crop the sides and zoom on any widescreen broadcasts to maintain correct aspect ratio and leave 4:3's alone

An update, just tried the fill setting and it worked a treat.
Still a bit of tweaking to do with overscan to get it perfect but I'm happy.

thanks a lot,
charlie

Does using 'Fill' NOT cause some programs to be in the wrong aspect ratio, or in your case 'Thin Mode' as I call it
Thin Mode: 16:9 image vertically stretched to fill 4:3 TV
Fat Mode: 4:3 image stretched horizontally to fill 16:9 TV

I'm a bit confused with MythTV myself as using the MonitorAspect 16:9 mplayer command works fine with video, BUT with LiveTV it doesn't work properly, maybe myth is overriding it OR mplayer is not correctly detecting the aspect ratio of the stream. I presume there is a different setting in myth that is better suited for widescreen TV