Help a noob, resolution and sound issue

slothmeister

slothmeister

slothmeister

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Joined
21 Feb 2006
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Southampton, UK
Hi guys,

So a few years ago i built a relatively cheap HTPC, running on a Abit iL-90MV motherboard and Windows 7 Its been running fine connected to a older LCD TV, display was done over VGA and the sound was outputted via optical to a pioneer home cinema system.

I've since moved into a smaller place and have had to get rid of the home cinema system, and have now got a newer tv.

So connected it all up, attempted to run both picture and sound of HDMI, firstly i cannot for the life of me get the resolution to the right settings. The recommended settings are 1980x1080, however if i use this setting half of the icons are over the edge of the screen, no amount of adjusting the res to different settings fit the screen at all.

Secondly there is no sound over HDMI, if you go into device manager there is no option for HDMI, all there is is High Definition audio device, this appears to be working and playing as the little bar moves up and down but no sound it outputted through the TV.

Any ideas?
 
What gpu are you using?

Also you need to check the overscan settings in the video card software to adjust the screen, I needed todo this when I had my HTPC (not sure if you done this :))

On the sound, when you right click the speaker in the tool bar, does the sound output show HDMI option.
 
I was having this same issue with my first ever PC, that I built recently (specs below in sig)

I know there is a graphics card in the specs, and you don't have one, but at this point when I was having the issue the graphics card was not actually installed.

I have a Sony 1920 x 1080 TV and I had connected it to my motherboards IO panel HDMI connector. I set the resolution to 1920 x 1080 (recommended) and like you say, all of the edges of the screen were missing from the TV.

The issue was NOT actually with my computer, it was in fact the TV.

TV's have a feature called overscan, I am not entirely sure why they do this but from what I have worked out overscan exists because this basically stretches the image, and a little bit of it is lost, then you do not see the parts of the recording (around the edges) that are not perfect quality, you just see the perfect parts.

This is fine when watching TV as it doesn't matter if you lose the edges a little bit, but when using it as a computer display, overscan is terrible because the lines around the edge of the screen are already perfect, and everything fits right up to those lines, so if overscan stretches it, then you end up losing parts of the picture.

Hope that makes sense and I know that explanation of overscan might be wrong, but regardless of that, overscan is still probably causing your issue, so read on to find out how to solve it

So what you need to do to solve it:

Go into your TV's settings, and switch off overscan for that HDMI input

I will tell you how I done it on my Sony because it might be similar for you:

Home
Settings
Screen
Select the HDMI input you want to make the change for

The display area is the setting you want to change, you want to make is so display area is set to 'Full Pixel'

And hopefully your problem will be solved :D
 
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