[mpukki]

This is called overscan - it'll normally be an option on your TV (look for thing called Zoom or Overscan and disable them)


motd

Not all users use panel tv. There are also those using projectors and/or rear projection tv models. It is not rare that some portion of panel's pixels is outside of the viewable area. This is true at least on some rear projection tv models and still a nececcity (at least in my opinion) with any projector, because the edges of the picture will never, or rarely be straight and/or geometrically correct. And that's why screens usually have black bars on their edges. So sometimes it really is necessary to get for example 1912x1072 resolution centered for 1080p panel.

This is also why I think that it is a huge problem with projectors, that have 1920*1080 panel and the material is 1:1 same resolution. Usage of overscan then always results to scaling material onto another resolution. Or some portion of material is not viewable. With movies such cropping is not necessarily a problem, as at least movie studios do cut (or at least did before) movies so that there is no relevant material on possible overscan area. But for example with XBMC user interface fills whole panel and there is no option for adding any kind of padding around the interface (or is there, I'm relatively new to XBMC, but have used other htpc interfaces in the past)

Fortunately though this is not anymore as huge problem, as it was with CRT projectors (the edges of picture are virtually always unusable), but then again, they were/are analog devices and can usually use a bit larger resolution than source material is. So adding pixels to the edges weren't such a problem. But at least I like to use black bars on edges of the screen still with LCD projection and I think that there are some others too.