Hello Friends,

I'm having a slight problem setting up my big screen TV as the second monitor on my media pc. For the most part I'm able to use the Nvidia drivers and utilities to set up what I want, however the real or true edge of my big screen TV lies just within the resolution I choose for that particular monitor. I hope that was clear. Said another way, on the big screen, if a window is maximized, the top edge and bottom (and sides) are chopped because the real screen edge lies just inside of my chosen resolution for the big screen. This is true for which ever resolution I choose. Of course, this makes working with the window quite difficult.

I'm using a 65" Toshiba CRT rear projection HD TV (the last model made before they stopped making CRTs). And I'm running PCLinuxOS, with an Nvidia GeForce FX 5900 graphics card (this is a dual monitor card of course).

I have had this set up with Win XP, and it works as expected, so I suspect that it's a problem with Nvidia's linux driver, but maybe I'm wrong. Could I have missed something in the Nvidia setup utility, or could there possibly be a tweak that can be applied to xorg.conf that would resolve this problem? I'm hoping someone else has tried to set up a big screen as their second monitor, and may have already had to deal with this.

Thank you all for any help,

S2

Hi, TVs use overscan (unlike monitors).

Change the value of "option TVOverScan" in xorg.conf (or create it if it doesn't exist).

You can do this manually (editing xorg.conf) or with the graphical nvidia-settings tool (click on the the ID under the "Display device" section for your TV, next lower "TV OverScan").

PS: Using the nvidia-settings tool is probably your easiest solution.

This appears to be related to my problem, however I am experiencing underscan not overscan. Regardless, I was playing around with the "Option TVOverScan" trying different values, and could not get it to do anything. I believe I'm using it correctly. Could this be due to the fact that I'm connecting the TV to my computer through an HDMI cable?

Thanks again for your help.

Euhm... Negative overscan *is* "underscan".

Just use nvidia-settings:

1.Open your terminal

2.Type: nvidia-settings

3.Lower overscan as I mentioned before (see the screenshot below):
http://img337.imageshack.us/my.php?i...mafdruktw3.png

This is what my screen looks like.

http://img521.imageshack.us/img521/6...apshot1iw7.jpg

Are we using the same version of the Nvidia driver? I'm using the latest one from the Nvidia web site: NVIDIA-Linux-x86-100.14.19-pkg1.

Thanks for your patience.

Ah... I think I know what's going wrong.

If you connect your TV with a DVI output, X will see it as a monitor and not a TV.

Sadly this means you can't use nvidia-settings or the xorg option (It's only supported in the nVidia Windows driver as far as I know).

Overscan is part of your tv standard (done by your TV), so 1:1 will not work(do blame TV manufacturers for this).

Possible solutions could be:

1. Change(lower) the ModLine (might give a small quality loss).
Xvidtune is a nice app to help you with this.
WARNING: Be very careful with this, bad modlines "could" damage your TV (even though I've never seen that actually happening)

2. Use TV-OUT(s-video and friends) if your card supports that (quality will not be as good as with DVI, but it's much more flexible).

PS: Notice that this is mostly a TV failure. You're not losing anymore pixels as with any other source (cable, satellite, ...).
If it's only for playing movies, it's not really that much of a problem.

Jens, thank you for all your help. I'll give the TV out a try.