HDTV as monitor
 

Hi, I'm using Mint 18, connected to 40" HDTV. However the display is too large, in that I can barely see the top edge of the icons/bottom menu. After some time trying to correct, I discovered that the monitor is logged as a 32" HDTV, not. a 40" display. I suspect this has caused this problem, however so far I've not discovered how to replace the 32" TV with the 40". Probably simple, but then...so am I! Help! (& thanks in advance)

Hello and welcome to LQ.

I think there are two things going on. One is they way some hdmi displays report to the OS. The other is the screen resolution. Both could be in play here.

How did you decide that the monitor is logged as a 32 inch display?

Hi Jeffry, Thanks. I determined the 32" monitor by going to 'preferences/display' where the only monitor is shown as a 32" Sony, whereas the actual TV is a 40" TV.

Jefro, also, the resolution was set to 1920X1080 (16:9). I changed to 1280X720 (16:9). Made no difference.No other choices in drop-down. Detect displays button does nothing.

The big problem is that MANY HDTV sets refuse to display the borders when using either 1920x1080 or 1280x720 resolution. Sometimes, there's a menu option to allow it, but often there just is no option at all. This means it's impossible to do a proper pixel-for-pixel display on them. In some cases, you can get around this stupid limitation by using a VGA cable instead of an HDMI cable. Dumb, but true!

Now, you can often get a pixel-for-pixel display option if you use a different resolution, such as 1280x1024, but then you have huge black borders around the screen. Ridiculous and stupid.

Why do TV makers do this? It's a dumb reason. When displaying certain legacy TV content, the top border will have flashing bars encoding CCTV text data. The TV makers don't want to field service calls from people complaining about the flashing bars at the top of the screen. On ancient CRT TVs, this content was not shown because of overscan. Overscan was the practice of purposefully making the display beam overscan past the borders of the actual CRT display. This meant that the top, left, right, bottom borders were not actually visible. The beam would be steered entirely off screen so the borders weren't seen. The customer would see the display stretch all the way from edge to edge of the actual display, and not complain about borders. CCTV crammed the CCTV text data into this "invisible" border area. blah blah blah...

blah blah blah... The bottom line is that TV makers have been purposefully overscanning everything even though it makes the picture blurrier just because they've always done so and they don't want to field service calls from stupid people complaining about CCTV stuff. Never mind that the solution to the service call is simply to turn on the "overscan" menu option. Nope, they'd rather not have any such menu option at all.

What can you do about it? Nothing. You can look out for the problem when you are buying your next TV. Look at the Amazon reviews and make absolutely positively sure at least one reviewer who knows what they're talking about has successfully gotten a proper pixel perfect display working via the input you wish to use (HDMI or VGA).

That said, there is a kludge you can do to at least make things vaguely usable. What desktop environment are you using? If you are using XFCE4, there is an option to set margins around the display where the WM won't put windows. Counterintuitively, the "margins" option is in the "Workspaces" settings. Other Desktop environments/Window Managers may have similar options.

It's an ugly kludge that won't eliminate the inevitable scaling blurring/artifacts, but it works.

I had a heck of a time making one tv of mine work. I'd power down and remove ac plugs and press power buttons and then power up one or the other first and various connect one to the other deals till it worked. Might try that if all else fails.

In windows there is a way to force they way the monitor reports. I forget where I did that but I'd think linux has it to. Basically your force the OS to use what you tell it.
I know this isn't much help here.

Where are you seeing this information?

H IsaacKuo, Thanks. Your first para..mentions connection via VGA cable, I'd just done that since last posting, result was that my 40" Sony showed up in display, and I was able to remove the Dony 32". There were several resolution choices, all results in a much smaller display screen (does not fill the 40" tv screen). That's be ok though, but then I connected 'sound' via a sound cable from computer, but have not been able to achieve any sound! Computer has three jacks, pink, green, blue), tried them all plus headphone outlet.

Computer is a Gateway desktop,(W8 era) running Mint 18, and worked well with my previous newer tv, but not this one (2008 Sony LED)

Anyway, it's now hours (days) into this at no avail, so- I think I'll just pack it up for a while and lose my headache. Oh, and thanks for your reply.