Poor Quality and size of TV picture (1 Viewer)

[Reg]

Hi all I am new to Media Portal.

I have RC 4 running quite well now, but the picture when watching TV is a bit faded compared to watching the same channel on TV and not via Media Portal. Is there a remedy for this or is that as good as it gets?

Also the picture does not fully fill my monitor or TV screen. It has black borders around it. Is there any way to make it fill the whole screen?

Neither the monitor nor the TV that is connected to the computer are wide screen.

Regards
Reg

 

[grubi]

Hi all I am new to Media Portal.

I have RC 4 running quite well now, but the picture when watching TV is a bit faded compared to watching the same channel on TV and not via Media Portal. Is there a remedy for this or is that as good as it gets?

Also the picture does not fully fill my monitor or TV screen. It has black borders around it. Is there any way to make it fill the whole screen?

Neither the monitor nor the TV that is connected to the computer are wide screen.

Regards
Reg

The problems you see are not related to MediaPortal. You have to make your graphic card and your TV set work nicely together. If you are interested in getting good quality on TV IMO you have to buy an advanced graphic card from ATI or NVIDIA which has builtin deinterlacing capabilites. Also the connection between graphic card an TV is important. FBAS or S-VIDEO outputs of graphic cards are known to not deliver best signal quality.

As you did not tell us anything about your config any additional suggestions would be a wild shot into the dark.

Regards,

grubi.

 

[Reg]

The graphics card and TV set work nicely together in MCE, but MCE is no longer an option for me as I am planning to add a dual digital HD tuner card which according to what I read wont work under MCE in my country.

The graphics card is an ATI Radeon X600 256mb and I think that has built in deinterlacing capabilites.

The connection between graphic card and TV is S-VIDEO which as I say works fine under MCE so I doubt it is the cable causing the problem.

So I am thinking it must be something about Media Portal not the hardware.

The system itself is a Dell Dimension dual core 3.2gig with 1 gig of RAM

Regards Reg

 

[grubi]

Also the picture does not fully fill my monitor or TV screen. It has black borders around it. Is there any way to make it fill the whole screen?

This is quite normal as TV is most often produced with an overscan. You can compensate this in MediaPoral if you press F9 while watching a TV channel. From the context menu select cropping and then set the number of pixels you want to get cropped off on each side.

 

[Reg]

Also the picture does not fully fill my monitor or TV screen. It has black borders around it. Is there any way to make it fill the whole screen?

This is quite normal as TV is most often produced with an overscan. You can compensate this in MediaPoral if you press F9 while watching a TV channel. From the context menu select cropping and then set the number of pixels you want to get cropped off on each side.

I tried that, everything is set to zero, but it only allows me to make the picture smaller and not larger ie I can click the numbers on the right and that makes it smaller but the numbers on the left which theoretically make the picture larger are unclickable ie locked at zero.

Any other ideas ?

 

[grubi]

Also the picture does not fully fill my monitor or TV screen. It has black borders around it. Is there any way to make it fill the whole screen?

This is quite normal as TV is most often produced with an overscan. You can compensate this in MediaPoral if you press F9 while watching a TV channel. From the context menu select cropping and then set the number of pixels you want to get cropped off on each side.

I tried that, everything is set to zero, but it only allows me to make the picture smaller and not larger ie I can click the numbers on the right and that makes it smaller but the numbers on the left which theoretically make the picture larger are unclickable ie locked at zero.

Any other ideas ?

It does not make the picture smaller. The picture stays equal in size and you crop off the borders of the TV picture.
From what you wrote it sounds like you always have black borders around the picture not only on TV but on the GUI also.

In this case you can adjust overscan of your display by selecting Settings -> Screen set-up -> Screen calib.
Not sure if this will cure the problem you are having.

HTH.

grubi.