I just connected my tv to the S-video output of my Geforce 400mx and I'm getting black bars on the side of the screen. The black bars show up on the text only screen Alt+F1, and the X screen Alt+F7. The bars are slightly wider on the X screen.

I notice that when I switch from 800x600 to 640x480 the screen gets wider, and the black bars get narrower. But the top and bottom get cut off. The X screen never gets wider than the text screen, so I'm starting to think this has nothing to do with X settings.

I have been playing with DisplaySize and that does not seem to be having an effect.

I am also having the blue bars on the side while watching live TV or recordings.

Are there video driver settings that will adjust the screen size?

_________________
KnoppMyth R5B7
Asus P4P800-VM
P4 2.4 Ghz - 1GB RAM
PVR-150 - HD-5000
Geforce FX 5200

Morning,
From what I understand of this problem and I am having almost the same issue using a GeForce2 400mx, on a 32 inch widescreen TV. Part of the problem for me is aspect ratio. On my screen there are dark black boarders down the left and right side of the picture (no photons being fired from the electron gun at the back) due to the 4:3 ratio of 800x600 while my screen is 16:9. This is because that the 800 of my resolution is not wide enough. Similarly the top and bottom are a grey-black, active but not actually recieving an image as the 576 is not as big as 600. Mind you, if you google about such things and search this forum many people mention the problems graphics cards have with TV's... not square pixels to mention one. Limitiations of S-Video to mention another. Make any sense?
Good.
Now with your smaller resolution your TV can make more use of the picture.
As to your blue bands down the top and left edge, there is a fix for this on the wikki. I tried it and it didn't work for me. Think this due to the graphics card though.
Not much help then.
If you get any further with this, I'd love to know. I'm currently looking at putting together a custom modeline to get the picture right. Oh and I'm upgrading to a Nvidia fx5200 soon.
Chris

With geforce2 cards you need to use nvtv. See this info on the wiki:
http://knoppmythwiki.org/index.php?page=TVOverScanHowto
For the blue lines:
http://knoppmythwiki.org/index.php?page=BlueBorders
Buying an FX5200 card is a good idea. If you live in PAL land, they do can do PAL resolution 720x576. Which I could never get to work perfectly with the geforce2 card and nvtv.

I am running R5A30.2.

I try running nvtv -r 768,576 -s Large# -t -S NTSC asm mythtv after starting nvtvd as root. I have my display set to :0.0.

I get the following error.




What is Large mode? Why cant nvtv find it? Does it need to be in my XF86Config-4? The overscan howto does not mention any other dependant files.

_________________
KnoppMyth R5B7
Asus P4P800-VM
P4 2.4 Ghz - 1GB RAM
PVR-150 - HD-5000
Geforce FX 5200

OK, I found nvtv -l. The only valid resolutions available are 800x600 and 640x480. When I set 800x600 the screen is over full and still as more than 1 inch of black bar on the left.

Will I have to recompile nvtv to get this right? Even if I do this, will I still end up with a black bar on the left. Does this problem go away with a Geforce 5200? If so, frys has them for $30. I'll pick one up if I have to.

_________________
KnoppMyth R5B7
Asus P4P800-VM
P4 2.4 Ghz - 1GB RAM
PVR-150 - HD-5000
Geforce FX 5200

Greg, could you post your XF86Config-4 that you had for your GeForce2 card?

I think that the example that I a using is for a Gforce-4.

I am borrowing a Gforce 5200 and I'll try it out over the weekend, but I suspect I'll have to do some tweaking to get it right too.

_________________
KnoppMyth R5B7
Asus P4P800-VM
P4 2.4 Ghz - 1GB RAM
PVR-150 - HD-5000
Geforce FX 5200

For those who come after me, the Geforce 2 cards do not have the overscan settings in nvidia-settings. The Geforce 4 cards do. I was able to increase the overscan to 21 to get rid of all the black bars. I then added nvidia-settings --load-config-only to the .fluxbox/apps file so these settings would get picked up each time gdm starts.

Now on to video quality.

_________________
KnoppMyth R5B7
Asus P4P800-VM
P4 2.4 Ghz - 1GB RAM
PVR-150 - HD-5000
Geforce FX 5200