16/9 Output on TV

[lohengrin]

Hello,

I'm using a PC with G400 MAX DH on my 16/9 Sony TV. I dont have monitor on this PC, just TV.

I want to customize video mode so I can use full width of my TV with no deformations. I have tried mtstu tools but when in clone mode, video modes with non 4:3 aspect ratio dont work.

If you have a solution ?

Thanks

[dZeus]

hmm... I haven't been able to use non 16/9 modes on my G400 in clone mode either. Though you need 5.7x drivers to have a change of getting it to work in the first place, since the older drivers only support 'hardware' clone modes, i.e. 640x480, 800x600 and 1024x768 to tv. 5.7x give you the possibility to add clone modes of other resolutions, because it will scale in software vs. the chip that's on the G400. I haven't tried that hard, but 16:9 modes didn't like clone mode on my pc either.

You wouldn't benefit much from anything higher than 688x384 - 1024x576 anyway, because the highest resolution the G400 can encode (to tv) from is 688x576 (afaik). With 1024x576 a lot of horizontal pixels are lost already (33 percent definition).

I would advice to use 768x576 (add with MTSTU) for clone on PAL, and set your TV to widescreen mode and adjust the clone tv-out settings so that the picture will fall as much within the visible tv area as possible without affecting aspect ratio too much. You need the 5.5x drivers or earlier driver versions to do this adjustment, though only with 5.7x drivers you can add the 768x576 res. Otherwise use 800x600 on PAL).

[Randy Simons]

The DVD Max option does provide an 16:9 aspect ratio option. So perhaps if you get yourself a cheap old B/W monitor for the first head, things might be easy after all.

because the highest resolution the G400 can encode (to tv) from is 688x576

Are you sure about that? While 1024x768 is much higher than PAL resolution, I think those pixels are just blended into eachother, giving an effect like "bilineair filtering" of PhotoShop etc when scaling images down. Using higher resolutions the second head doesn't matter for movies (anyone seen a movie of res higher than PAL lately? but when viewing images etc I think there's less information lost than on lower resolutions.

[dZeus]

yup, I'm absolutely sure about 688x576... so there's no use in running at any res. higher than 800x600 when cloning to PAL. (in fact, I think that something in between of 768x576 and 688x516 is best for cloning with PAL. (with 5.7x drivers in win2k).