VMC Display Issues

DerekBaker

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When displaying LiveTV with VMC there are various annoyances that afflict the output.

All stations have moderately sized bars at the right and left - though BBC News has the ticker, but not the rest of the picture, extending all the way to the right hand side.

Some stations have a step at the top, others at the bottom - some have neither. This step can flicker or display a dotted line.

Within the borders the picture is fine.

The same stations displayed with the TV's own tuner have none of these issues.

Both the desktop and VMC are set to 1920x1080 @50Hz. CCC is set to force 0% scaling. Both the desktop and VMC's UI fill the whole scene with no problems.

The aerial input is fine - TV receives same input shared through a splitter. Plugging the aerial cable directly into the computer shows the same issue.

BlackGold BGT3540 with 6.0.0.34 (same issue with 6.0.0.38).
Onboard HD 3200 with Cat 8.12 (same issue with 8.11).
Vista 64 SP1 Home Premium, fully patched.
Samsung LE32A558 connected via HDMI.


Any ideas?

Thanks.
 
If you try the zoom (press "i" and cycle through the options) and also, if you have a step, try a small amount of scaling that it's just off the screen.
 
Video settings on your graphics card and in your software and so on , the zoom functions , the full screen functions , all available under the setup options in media center itself.

If these dont work, then it could be the way your computer is actually communicating with your TV , in which case go with the registry settings to adjust the margins and overscan , I would try overscan first and see how it looks , then the margins.

This issue is not uncommon by the way , lots of TV's dont fill the screen properly when showing live TV in media center.
 
No luck with those registry settings.

EDIT: However going through the TV setup, telling VMC I had a monitor rather than a flat panel, and allowing it to automatically optimize, seems to have done the job.
 
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Yep - in some situations VMC will display the entire broadcast picture on monitors (and TVs with 1:1). This can be annoying if you don't like the thin black bars on the left and right of the picture.

The very thin bars are caused by variations in blanking on some cameras, VT machines etc. in studios, with thicker bars (particularly on the news channels) caused by 14:9 pillarboxing of 4:3 material when converting from 4:3 to widescreen (mainly agency and library pictures, and some US stuff still)

VMC can be configured to simulate overscan (which is the behaviour of most TVs, where they crop the edges of the picture and zoom a bit - or in the days of CRTs "over-scanned" an area wider and taller than the phosphor dots on the tube - so you didn't see the edges of the picture) - either through the registry or during TV set-up (when you tell it you have a monitor I think it adds overscan compensation, when you have a TV it assumes you have overscan already so doesn't crop the picture and moves the UI in a bit - in expectation that the picture will be cropped by the TV?).
 

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