Edges of screen image missing

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by bgorrell

Stranger89, thanks! I forgot all about the Zoom controls and, indeed I had some control over the size with Overlay enabled. It acts very strangely though. The "offset" values have no affect and the "vertical" option gives unexpected results, like sometime adjusting horizontal instead. I worked with it for a half hour and was unable to get acceptable vertical results untill I tried choosing 16x9 in the ATI control panel clone mode options. Really wierd considering my TV is 4x3, but this gave me 4x3 plus the extra 5% that I needed to fill the screen properly (with slight, appropriate overscan). Who knew? I remember spending hours on this a couple years ago when I first got SageTV and had given up on a fullscreen display.

Now, as for overlay, unfortunately this seems to be the only way overscan works for me. I have to select Overlay or "Default" (DX7) in SageTV and Clone/Theatre mode in ATI's control panel. The result is no UI. Do you have any tricks up your sleeve that might solve this?

Thats a side effect of using Theater Mode, it displays video (no UI/OSD) fullscreen on the specified monitor. The only way around it is to use Extended Desktop with Sage on the TV (you'll probably have to set the TV as the primary to get Overlay working though).

As for not needing HW decoding in the future and being a small market, I have to disagree. Lots of people are on a tight budget. HDTVs with DVI inputs are still very expensive and I'm pretty sure well over 75% of the market still uses SDTVs. Lots of us bought SageTV as a "poor man's TiVo". Thankfully it has been much more rewarding than that. The hardware is really all that's lacking in comparison to the plug-n-play results of TiVo. Yes, eventually "PC friendly" TVs will alleviate the need for hardware decoders, but it will probably be at least another five years before more than 50% of the population are using them.

There's one catch though, the group that uses Sage and HTPCs is not the "general public." They are generally more tech savy, and more up to date. I'd agree (without looking it up I can't verify) that HTDVs are only about 75% market penetration, but in the market consisting of SageTV user type people, I'd guess it's much higher. Just look at the poll, I just posted, over 50% of the people who responded are using either an HDTV or computer monitor (we need to have a talk with those HDTV users running S-Video).

In the mean-time, give us more "poor-man" solutions and we will gobble them up. After all, if a $50 DVD player can have a top-notch hardware MPEG2 decoder in it (better than the 350 really), why not a standard video card? And while were at it, newer DVD players even decode MPEG4 and DivX to the TV , so apparently the chipsets are out there, just not taken advantage of.

There are two big difficulties with adding Xcard type decoders to video cards. One they only support a very limited number of resolutions (far less than Video Cards do). Then there's the added cost of adding another chip and all the requisite circuitry. Plus, Xcard type users are an very small niche of the video card market (probably 1%ish), for the majority of video card owners the Hardware Accelleration/DXVA is more than enough.

And then one more thing, many people get hung up on HW decoders, remember that with SD, probably 99% if not 100% of the difference between and Xcard and SW decoder/video card is what happens after decoding. On a video card, it's deinterlaced/scaled/interlaced before output, on the Xcard the BT656 digital interlaced video is directly converted to analog. I'd bet that the output from most SW decoders is essentially identical to that of the Xcard's HW decoder.