Overscan over HDMI

[sherbey]

I've seen innumerable posts here about this; I've got annoying overscan over HDMI onto my Sony KDF-E50 LCD television. There is no mechanism that I can find of adjusting this on the set itself (there is a maintenance mode I've managed to get the telly into, but I was scared and ran away). At 1080i50 it cuts the menu and status bars off completely, making it a bit hard to use. Adjusting the display to 720p50 reveals just enough pixels to guess where to click the mouse.

I understand that the Nvidia Windows driver has the ability to adjust overscan settings to eliminate this problem; is there any proposal to add this feature into the Linux driver? I'm using 180.60 on an acer aspire revo (ion/atom based nettop pc).

[Hayek]

I'm having the same problem.

[sherbey]

<BUMP>

Overscan correction for linux drivers isn't a priority for nvidia I take it

[brianbloom]

I've stopped holding my breath for this one and given up on using the nvidia drivers entirely. I just use the stock generic ones, lose any performance gains and features, but at least can see my whole screen. :P

Wake me up when nvidia actually fixes this.

[ir123]

Only 1080 works for me. 720 is out of the screen. But strangely 1024x768 and 800x600 work fine and in correct aspect ratio. You might try that in the meantime if you haven't already.

[theidealist]

Hey,

It's good to know I'm not alone here. I'd just like to report that I'm experiencing the same issue on my Panasonic Plasma TV running at 720 (it doesn't support full 1080). I've tried the latest as of today stable (180.something) and beta (190.something) that support my ION-based Acer Revo. Same problem in both

If I understand things correctly, the typical techniques of resolving this issue, setting a custom modeline and/or messing with TVOverscan option are futile because they are for fixing an analog problem. I actually thought HDMI and these newer all digital connections were supposed to fix this at a hardware level.

Anyway, NVIDIA is still awesome for supporting Linux at all in my opinion, and their driver makes Boxee scream despite the crappy little intel chip in the machine. I think this little ION machine is one of the coolest things I've seen in ages. Thanks!

I would appreciate, however, if someone from NVIDIA could make some boilerplate or more formal response on the following:

1.) Can NVIDIA confirm this issue?
2.) Is this a "typical" overscan issue?
3.) Is this something that is fixable in future driver releases?
4.) If it is fixable is this something that will be fixed for us?

If all of these have already been answered, can we get link(s) to the answers because I couldn't find them.

Thanks!

Patrick

[cthulhu]

My understanding of the problem is, that your displays are either missing a 1:1 pixel mapping option or it's hiding itself under some non-descriptive name in a well-hidden menu. Blaming NVidia for bad displays is hardly fair. It would however improve their reputation, if they decide to include options to circumvent faulty/feature-starved displays.

Luckily I did my research before buying me Samsung M86 and made sure it had the "Just Scan" option, which is Samsungs name for 1:1 pixel mapping.

[_john_i_]

I know this is probably tv-specific, but my tv (philips 47in lcd) lets you set attached device type for the various hdmi inputs. If you select "PC", it turns off the overscan on the tv for this input, giving me the full 1920x1080 without cutting off the sides.

Previously my old tv didn't have this option, so I made some adjustments in mplayer to slightly scale down and shift over video to fit in the viewable area.

[sherbey]

The issue is indeed caused by the screen and not the nvidia hardware - some sets allow you to map 1:1 and remove the cropping.
As I said in the original post though, rescaling the output to overcome this is provided for windows users. In the linux driver I can set the resolution to 720 whilst using 1080i/50; if I use the option 'central' (I think - I'm not on the telly at the mo) the screen gets scaled to a small window in the middle of the screen. Its nomally stretched to size, which crops the edges off. What would be good is if nvidia could stretch to a user-specified size maybe

Anyway, no nvidia representatives have visited this thread so its obviously not going to happen any time soon

[Sky777]

yes, with "PC" hdmi profile on my Philips 47PFL9703 I don't have overscan too

[Dragorep]

Some discussion with the TV manufacturer and retailer may well be in order. Consider whether any of their promotion may have been misleading, was there any warning of overscan - or could you have been "mislead by omission" of important information that overscan could not be turned off? It may be the TV manufacturer can be persuaded to do a firmware upgrade.

None the less it is disappointing NVIDA took away what they previously gave, namely overscan correction.

It does not make sense why NVIDIA's latest drivers support overscan correction on Windows but not on Linux. Why is that?

Please NVIDIA, many people would like to hear from you whether you plan to re-introduce overscan correction on Linux.

[sherbey]

The problem you'll get is that overscan isn't normally something that television manufacturers flag in their specifications anywhere. You could ask the shop assistant, but certainly in the UK they're not noted for being the country's brain trust. The only point where you're going to find out definitively that your telly won't work well with your PC is when you connect them up. Its a bit late then

I don't think nvidia have ever offered overscan correction in the linux drivers, the feature is present in the windows driver only (I'm told, I don't have a copy of windows on a pc with an nvidia video card).

Overall I'm very happy with the support nvidia give to linux; the VDPAU acceleration of video has let me build a 20W consumption pc that plays H.264 1080i50 video with ease. I guess I'm just unlucky to have a telly that has no facility to remove overscan...