Small video output (letterbox)

[Ian Davies]

I'm using Sage 6.2 with a Hauppauge PVR-350 capture card and am using an nVidia GeForce 7200 graphics card to output the windows desktop (including Sage in full-screen mode) to my TV.

I have calibrated the graphics card so that the desktop fills the screen of my TV and I have adjusted Sage's overscan settings to match. However, whilst the output from the Sage on-screen display looks correctly sized relative to my TV, the video output itself is shown in a letterbox in the middle of the screen, with large black borders around it.

Are there any settings where I can configure the size of the TV signal output?

Thanks,

Ian.

[Opus4]

You've completely disabled the 350's TV output that you were previously using? If so, maybe check Detailed Setup -> Multimedia -> Aspect Ratio Settings.

- Andy

[rethdog]

i had the little picture thing happening to me, unfortunately i had been messing around with two things, nvidia Purevideo, and getting the htpc to come out of hiberation.

my cure was to disable fse (full screen exclusive), and remove the nvidia pure video. FYI other users report tearing when disabling fse. the pure video didn't seem to lower processor usage much over the intervideo option with the registry hack (i think this is all the acceleration my card can do), my card is an agp 6800gs

http://www.nvidia.com/docs/CP/11036/...Comparison.pdf

[Ian Davies]

I've played around with the apect ratio settings and have succeeded in making the picture fill the screen but the quality is not particularly good.

This may be my video card, however.

Thanks for your help.

Ian.

[nielm]

Originally Posted by Ian Davies

the quality is not particularly good.

I don't know how you are connecting your TV, but sadly, PC video card's TV output will never be as good as hardware decoder's output (eg from an MVP or the PVR-350), especially over composite video or S-Video connectors. The video gets deinterlaced, resized to the desktop, then resized again and re-interlaced for TV-out, all of which introduces blur, and the source video scanlines will never be matched to the TV display's scanlines.