[Bullet1979]

I recently upgraded my graphics card from a Radeon R7770 to a NVIDIA GTX 770 and no matter what settings I change, any time I start playback in XBMC, the screen goes black for a few seconds and the screen is zoomed in. I have verified that this behavior also happens in Windows Media Center, so it is the GPU driver and not only in XBMC.

This brought back memories to years ago before when I had an older NVIDIA card and had these issues and I think my only solution was to use a super old driver (which I don't want to use now because I want to use my HTPC to game as well). Has anyone encountered this and was able to find a solution?

To be clear, the resolution and scaling is 100% correct even when opening XBMC but then once playback begins for any movie or TV show the screen scales and shows only a portion of the viewable area. Once playback stops, the resolution and scaling goes back to normal.

My HTPC is connected via HDMI to a Sony XBR6 HDTV with pass-through through a AV receiver (the PC recognizes and identifies the Sony TV).

[noggin]

Do you have adjust frame rate enabled in Kodi? If so I suspect that when you are playing a video file Kodi is changing frame rates. Most video drivers have different overscan settings for each frame rate, so you may need to manually select each frame rate and adjust the overscan settings for each one.

[Bullet1979]

That's an interesting point... but unfortunately I'm not seeing options in the NVIDIA drivers to manipulate overscan settings on a per framerate basis. I've tried turning on overrides and things like that but to no avail.... I'm beginning to think I'll be better off by exchanging for a ATI card and being done with it!

[noggin]

That's an interesting point... but unfortunately I'm not seeing options in the NVIDIA drivers to manipulate overscan settings on a per framerate basis. I've tried turning on overrides and things like that but to no avail.... I'm beginning to think I'll be better off by exchanging for a ATI card and being done with it!

From memory, and it may not have been nVidia, at least one driver worked by setting the refresh rate and accepting it, and then manually changing the overscan rate when in that refresh rate. You then changed refresh rate to a different value, and changed the overscan rate again.

It wasn't obvious that it was related to frame rate, but it stored different overscan (and other) settings on a per refresh rate basis. I don't think you had to explicitly save the settings but you may have had to APPLY/OK them.

It's definitely something I remember causing me problems - you'd set the overscan setting at 50Hz and all would be well, but would then play some 24p content and suddenly the overscan was wrong.

I also remember that even finding the overscan slider in some driver settings in Windows was a challenge...