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2011-10-07, 07:05
So, tonight I assembled my ATI A4-3600, loaded windows, loaded drivers and hooked it up to my 65" Panasonic Plasma TV.
And... I have a problem (and this is exactly why I hesitated on going the HTPC route in the first place).
In Windows, if I go into the ATI Fusion control panel, I can set overscan to 0 and it looks like it is CLOSE to 1:1 pixel mapping, but there is still a very slight border around windows. This might or might not be normal (probably is normal).
My TV supports 1 to 1 pixel mapping and is set to mode JUST (which is 1 to 1) and HDMI mode 2 (which is 1 to 1). These settings all give me perfect full 1080P screen with my Boxee Box, Blu-ray player and TiVo.
However, when I fire up XBMC, and I play back a movie, I am getting the movie playing windowed on the screen. What am I missing to get this working properly? It's rather frustrating as I have spent hours changing settings in the ATI control panel, re-checking my TV settings, etc. I can go in and calibrate XBMC to "zoom" in the playback, but this should not be necessary on a brand new 2011 model 1080P Plasma set. It should be displaying properly as full screen (at least for 1080P content).
Any advice would be much appreciated, before I pitch this thing out the window.
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Is xbmc changing your framerate or resolution during video playback?
Unfortunately, all ATI gpu's (or apu for that matter) are by default set to overscan. When you change that setting, it only changes for the specific res+framerate combo, but all others are still set to overscan. For instance your desktop in windows is 1080p 60Hz and you set overscan to 0. Everything's fine until you start playback in xbmc and it changes it to 1080p 24Hz and you get overscan.
You have two options:
1) Disable changing framerate within xbmc and let it play everything at 60fps and make sure overscan is disabled for 1080p 60Hz,
or
2) In windows, keep changing the refresh rate and resolution while setting overscan to 0 in catalyst for each combo.
It's annoying that catalyst has overscan set by default. It is even more annoying that you can't set overscan to 0 for every framerate/res combo at once.
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Thanks very much. You are right, it is really annoying and I would not have purchased an ATI solution if I knew this ahead of time. Are there any other settings that I need to adjust? Strangely I lost the "match display to source" option somewhere along the way with the tweaking I am doing. I think that even with overscan of zero I am getting a small black border, I will have to test out some more to know for sure.
Thanks again for your help.
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eskro
Posting Freak
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this is weird because, those new releases are meant for media playback in my opinion,,,
there's gotta be something to tweak somewhere,,
think u can ask Tech Support in the mean time?
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Actually the setting you are referring to is not in that place in the new CCC drivers. However, I had checked that and it was grayed out and set to "full screen". I think that the CCC drivers detect that you are hooked up to a TV and enforce this.
In any event, the setting in question was located in XBMC itself, there is a video playback option (only visible during video playback) that chooses how XBMC deals with formats like 720, and by default it was in a windowed mood. When I set it to "normal" it went full screen.
However, I have another problem, which is that when playing back videos that are anything other than the original refresh and resolution, when the refresh/resolution switches, the video becomes completely corrupted. Since "match refresh rate to source" is a requirement of mine, I will have to see if there is a solution to this, or I will have to get rid of it.
Honestly, I'm not very impressed with these ATI drivers in any event. Overscan on all resolutions on by default, heavy video processing on by default... it's just not geared to a home theater enthusiast so I can not recommend it at this time. It should not be this much work just to get basic things going like they ought to.
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eskro
Posting Freak
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your right voip-ninja, %100, im sorry you did not enjoy your purchase
and hope that you'll get everything sorted so you can start
enjoying your HTPC!
ATI should know that those APU's could attract HTPC users
and they should have made efforts in 'making stuff' that works without issues,,,
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I am probably more picky than most. Performance is not bad (I will make a video). It is a little less snappy than I would like, and AMD chipset has some problems with HDMI resume from standby if the rest of the HDMI devices are not up already.
Also, AMD does fine with presenting HD material at correct color space and luminance, but it will crush dark levels on SD material from what I can tell.
This would make a totally satisfactory solution for many people.