HTPC Tip Of The Day: Compensating For Rectangular Pixels (1024×768 TVs)

The credit for today’s Tip Of The Day goes to Jason Pierce. He did a lot of research to come up with a solution to stretched out text on 16:9 1024×768 plasma TVs with Media Center. 

 

The problem is when you have a 16:9 display that has a typical 4:3 resolution. For example, my Pioneer 4280 has a 1024X768 native resolution To avoid having set Windows to 1360X768 and have the TV rescale it back (thus muddying the picture), I found that the following works to tell VMC that the display device has non-square pixels. I imagine that a similar setup would work for non-square pixel displays other then 1024X768.

  1. Set your desktop to 1024X768 and run Media Center
  2.  Go to Configure Your TV or Monitor
  3. Go through the steps and choose 16:9.
  4. On the next screen, it will complain that you are running 1024×768 and yet you chose 16:9. It will ask you if you want to change your resolution. Say Yes.
  5. On the next screen, it lists various resolutions. Choose 1024×768. That is not a typo. Go ahead and choose it.
  6. When it asks for preview, go ahead and say Yes. If you don’t do this, it may not work. It didn’t for me.
  7. The screen should now change aspect ratios, but not resolution. In other words, text will stop looking stretched out. Say Yes to the question if you want to keep this resolution.

You should be set. Your resolution in VMC will stay at 1024×768, but Media Center will know it needs to compensate for the TV being 16:9.

The problem I kept having was that doing it this way is completely confusing. It is not a way anyone would guess. I actually got to this point by choosing 1360×768, then poking around at the registry and editing by hand. Armed with the knowledge of what this was doing, I went back and figured out how you are "supposed" to do it. 

 

Now, the only question I have left in my mind is if I should fiddle with the resulting registry settings.  It changed some settings underHKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Media Center\Settings\Display Device

PhysicalWidth=1024

PhysicalHeight=768

 LogicalWidth=1365

LogicalHeight=768

I can change LogicalWidth to 16 and LogicalHeight to 9 and the results are pretty much identical to the above settings.  I wonder if there’s any benefit at all to having one over the other.

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