Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Create custom resolutions for your HDTV display
- Thread starter OpenAreas
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Let me guess? 720p TV?
Google DisplayConfigX and SwitchResX. Its not quite as easy on the Mac side.
No i have a 1080p TV. Its running at 1920x1080 fine. But i'd like to lower it slightly but not to 1600x res!
I'm assuming you are meaning a sizeable TV 32inch or larger. This kind of lends itself to the big debate. tv vs monitor. Have you much experience of using the tv close up. Most people tend to complain about headaches after an hour or two of use. Most decent companies have it in there I.T policy that all screen are to be monitors and not tv when extended periods of viewing will exceed 30 minutes or at a distance less than 8ft. (repercussions from health & safety).
The 1080 resolution on say a 40 inch tv is really designed to be viewed from a distance in-excess of 6ft. Ideally 8ft. and is more for general viewing than concentration on small areas, reading text for example. Monitors left the 1080 standard years ago and even then where more capable than a lot of the most advanced tv's of today.
The 1080 resolution on say a 40 inch tv is really designed to be viewed from a distance in-excess of 6ft. Ideally 8ft. and is more for general viewing than concentration on small areas, reading text for example. Monitors left the 1080 standard years ago and even then where more capable than a lot of the most advanced tv's of today.
In my experience they work reasonably well -- when I had to program my GMA-based PC to fit my HDTV's resolution, I actually had to get the numbers from the ones made by SwitchResX on my Mac (editing DTD files for the GMA wasn't quite as easy as the Nvidia process seems to be).
Why do you consider them useless? Your other option of course is to go home and pout...
You might as well get over your dislike of SwitchResX and DisplayConfigX. I agree theyre not the most intuitive of applications. However, thats what you have to do on the Mac side to get custom resolutions.
Apple insists on creating the video card drivers for Mac OS X for stability purposes. Therefore, many of the advanced video card tools and features that NVIDIA and ATI ship on the Windows side are simply unavailable on the Mac.
Apple insists on creating the video card drivers for Mac OS X for stability purposes. Therefore, many of the advanced video card tools and features that NVIDIA and ATI ship on the Windows side are simply unavailable on the Mac.
It sort of upsets me that I can do more with custom ratios on a 5 year old Ubuntu box than with my MBP....
I currently have nearly the exact same problem. I need to eliminate the overscan on a 720p HDTV.
Is one of those apps, SwitchResX and DisplayConfigX, better than the other? Can either display a test resolution of 1248x704 before buying it? DisplayConfigX doesn't seem to be able to show it to me first. I'd like to know it'll actually work before I pay for it...
Is there really no plist or something anywhere that one could simply add a custom resoltution to?
FWIW, the 1:1 mode (PC-WIDE) on my Samsung leaves black borders on all four sides. It did the same thing in Windows (old HTPC, Mini is my new HTPC), although I could use the regular WIDE TV mode and set a custom resolution in the ATI control panel to compensate for the overscan. That looked great, you'd never know it was slightly scaled and my menu bar actually showed. Most of the time I VNC/Screen Share into the mini anyway, but I still don't like the overscan.
Is one of those apps, SwitchResX and DisplayConfigX, better than the other? Can either display a test resolution of 1248x704 before buying it? DisplayConfigX doesn't seem to be able to show it to me first. I'd like to know it'll actually work before I pay for it...
Is there really no plist or something anywhere that one could simply add a custom resoltution to?
FWIW, the 1:1 mode (PC-WIDE) on my Samsung leaves black borders on all four sides. It did the same thing in Windows (old HTPC, Mini is my new HTPC), although I could use the regular WIDE TV mode and set a custom resolution in the ATI control panel to compensate for the overscan. That looked great, you'd never know it was slightly scaled and my menu bar actually showed. Most of the time I VNC/Screen Share into the mini anyway, but I still don't like the overscan.