Scaling for PAL resolution 720x576

[congoblue]

Nearly all the GBPVR screens seem to be 720x480, but I'm outputting to a Pal TV at 720x576 - is this causing a lot of rescaling to be required for every screen? Are there any skins designed for 720x576? Or does GBPVR handle the scaling so well I shouldn't worry about it (it seems to).

To add to the fun it's a widescreen TV (CRT) which stretches the 720 pixels out, so anything round ends up squashed. (This is only for the menus, the TV pictures work properly with the 16:9 option set in config). So really I want a 720x576 skin with everything horizontally squashed.

As a slightly different question, there is massive overscan off the edges of the TV which I can cure by setting the picture width to 800 pixels in NVidia's "Advanced Timing" screen. Does this cause stress to the TV renderer as it has to rescale everything from the default 720 pix out to 800, or doesn't it make any difference to it?

[Fatman_do]

If it is a widescreen, have you tried the sassari skin? It is skinned for a 16:9 display as much as possible.

[ricklous]

As a slightly different question, there is massive overscan off the edges of the TV which I can cure by setting the picture width to 800 pixels in NVidia's "Advanced Timing" screen. Does this cause stress to the TV renderer as it has to rescale everything from the default 720 pix out to 800, or doesn't it make any difference to it?

Open config.xml and find the <!-- zoom control --> section and play with these settings. with some tweaking you should be able to reshape the GBPVR screen to fit inside the overscan boarders. I have done this on our setup and it works well. The PVR outputs to a CRT widescreen. The TV itself has a button you can use to cycle through screen sizes, labeled 'Cinema', 'letterbox', 'full', 'widescreen'. We set the TV to the one that used the least overscan and used GBPVRs Zoom controls to compensate for the rest.

[frankmcg]

Ricklous - I've done that and can confirm it works fine on the menus etc.

Only problem I've found though is that I can't find any way to stop the eg program descriptions being cut-off at the edges in the OSD. Zoom control doesn't seem to control that?

[ricklous]

actually, i think im wrong, ive just took a look and the settings i used was this section:

<!-- overscan control (border size in pixels) -->
<OverScanBorderX1>20</OverScanBorderX1>
<OverScanBorderY1>45</OverScanBorderY1>
<OverScanBorderX2>110</OverScanBorderX2>
<OverScanBorderY2>0</OverScanBorderY2>
<OverScanVideoAlso>true</OverScanVideoAlso>

which is just below the zoom settings section. the OverScanVideoAlso toggle would define weather your video and osd sits in the same place as your menus. my settings are obviously set up for our TV but will give you an idea of the effect it has.

[congoblue]

That works great! Thanks!

The "horizontal offset" in the zoom section you mentioned first does not seem to do anything, though you can get round this by changing the overscan settings.


The sassari skin, while very nice, is a bit too fine/small for a CRT at 720x576. I can see it would work very well on an LCD screen at its native resolution. I was wondering if there was a widescreen skin designed for a CRT at the native resolution of 720x576, but I can't see one. (CRTs are a bit of a dying breed now!)