So I bought this Insignia NS-LCD42HD 1080p television a while back, and I liked it a lot. The only problem was that it wasn’t designed to be a computer monitor. When I plugged my computer into it via HDMI, it had a lot of “overscan”, where you can’t see the edges of the screen.
Actually, if you took the bezel off, you probably could see the edges of the screen, but I like the bezel. It’s black and shiny, and it probably holds the screen in place, so if I took it off, I’d have to hold the screen up with duct tape, which, while possibly the handiest thing in the universe, is not at all stylish.
With HDMI there are no knobs to turn–no settings to set. What you see, literally, is what you get. So I switched to the VGA input, and that works just absolutely great at 720p. You hit the auto-adjust and everything fills the screen perfectly. 1080p, on the other hand, synced up just fine–I could see my desktop–but the television squeezed it to a 4:3 aspect ratio, like an old monitor or non-wide-screen television. Everything was squished.
I got up on the Internets and I Googled and I Yahooed and I searched high and low. I found plenty of people having the same problem, but no solutions. At least, not any that worked.
Now, back in 1994 when I was a lonely undergraduate I built my first IBM PC from scrap parts I got at used computer stores and bits and pieces I scavenged from work. I installed Linux on it (Slackware, for anybody tru geeq enough to remember) and set up “X Windows”. Back then there was no “system-config-display”; you couldn’t just bring up a little window and tell it what size you wanted your screen to be. Back then you set your screen size by typing a long string of almost incomprehensible numbers into a file. Pixel clock, front porch, back porch, horizontal sync size, horizontal sync polarity, vertical sync size, vertical sync polarity–I remember them all, pretty much.
I had a literally scrap 14″ monitor, and the specs didn’t give much hope of getting a screen large enough to be useful with X Windows. I’d learned pretty early on that specifications were more of a general guideline than hard and fast rules, and I messed around with those strings of numbers for days on end, until I had squeezed every last damned pixel out of that screen.
So when I couldn’t get my new television to show me the picture I wanted, I didn’t have to give up. I have an nVidia 9800GTX video card, and the control center software that came with it has a section for custom display modes. I went in there and I created myself a new custom display mode. Then I clicked on the “Advanced” button so I could see timing specs that were hidden from mere mortals.
I knew I didn’t need to change much, since I could already read the screen. All the sync settings must be okay, and since the screen was centered, those porch settings must be okay too. Heck, since the picture filled the whole vertical screen, all that vertical stuff must be gravy too. All I needed to look at, really, was the “horizontal total”. Something about that number was tricking my television into thinking I had a 4:3 resolution set up. It either needed to go up or down, and I didn’t have to be exact, because I knew if I got it close enough, the auto-adjust would take care of the rest.
So I decided to try down first, because if I’ve learned one thing over the years, it’s to try turning stuff down first. Guitar strings, same thing. It was set to 2576 when I started, so I set the “Timing Standard” drop-down to Manual (not GTF or DMT or CVT or LSD or PCP or 2CB or any of that other shit), and took a guess: 2300.
I clicked the Test button, and the screen immediately became wider and jumped about 5 inches to the left. It was still visible, though, so I accepted the change, and then went into the TV menu: Video->VGA->Auto Adjust.
Perfect. Fucking perfect. Godallmighty luxurious full-screen 1080p perfect.
In a few days Google will crawl this page, and anybody with the smarts to search for the keywords I’ve embedded in this blog, and the perseverence to read down through the self-indulgent drivel I’ve written here will know how to make their television make pretty pictures–all because of me and those hours in my dorm room when I was a kid.
And that’s why, whe the weather’s cool and the moon’s just right, I love being a geek.
