Theory, and reality were different for me. Just changing cables and rebooting wasn't enough.

My first r5e50 was with svideo connected from my graphics card to my lcd TV. It was flawless. I wanted higher resolution, and was unable to get VGA or dvi->hdmi to work. VGA wouldn't display, and dvi would only display at a small resolution, maybe 640x480. I had limited success converting to component out. But that took many many late nights futzing with modelines and tv color settings. And in the end nothing was lined up exactly right. More futzing with modelines and overscan settings and in the end TV shows ended up not being quite the same size as the screen, the desktop was larger than the screen, and text was blurry.

Then, for the wrong reasons (and nothing to do with the display quality) I did a re-install of r5e50. I figured I'd try the dvi->hdmi cable to see if it works this time. To my amazement, with the cable connected at time of install, the display now worked very nice. Both the desktop and mythtv lined up perfectly, at 800x600 resolution. No more overscan, and no more blurry text (I use firefox quite a bit). I'd like having a higher resolution, but everything looks pretty nice.

So, maybe I shouldn't have had to reinstall to fix the display settings, but it worked out very well for me.

You may not need to do anything, but you won't know that until you see the output on your TV. If you don't like what you see and can't resolve it with the post you refer to then you could try a re-install. Of course there's no guarantee that would produce better/different results, but it seemed to help in mogator88's case.

Bottom line: You don't know what you have at this point until you hook it up to your TV

OK. So it's not really well defined what exactly one should do to optimally display mythtv on an lcd tv! Sounds very strange! But I believe you. So I'll try to hook up the tv, like you say. Since my monitor right now is hooked up via dvi cable and the tv will also be hooked up via dvi->hdmi, it may really work. If not, I'll try to edit X config like the post suggested. If it still doesn't work, I'll reinstall with "tv". If that doesn't work, I'll again edit the X config file. Finally, if THAT doesn't work, I'll start playing with modelines.

I'll post again when I've sorted it out. Meanwhile, I'll keep checking here and if anyone has a more certain solution than this "trial and error" method, please let me know!

Please note that "work" and "optimal" are two very different things here. Your TV-out will "work" (I have no reason to believe it won't, it always has in my testing with nVidia chipsets) but may or may not be "optimal" (fuzzy, shifted, etc.)

The "trial and error" method is still necessary because there are too few (if any) identical setups, so you have to find the right combination(s) to work with your specific hardware, including your TV. Think of how many different nVidia FX5200s are out there (different manufacturers with different BIOS with different RAMDAC with different...), how many different versions of the nVidia driver, etc.

ok. it was a very easy process:

i set everything up using my regular computer display, then i powered off, hooked everything up to the tv, powered on, and got a nice screen. i opened a terminal, added mythtv to the list of sudoers, ran sudo nvidia-settings, hiked up the resolution, and saved the changes to xorg.conf. then i went to the mythtv menu, setup, playback, and hiked up the overscan to 2%. the resolution of the tv was slightly higher than that offered by nvidia, so i asked the tv to stretch the picture to fill up the screen. this way i don't burn black. but the stretch is not even noticeable (only a couple of pixles, i believe!). it looked beautiful! no need to look for modelines or anything! i played a bit with deinterlacing and encoding methods, till i found optimal ones. i now love it!

:D

Beats the computer monitor doesn't it?

Enjoy!

BIG TIME!