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Home Theater: Setting Up a Home Theater Macintosh
Tuesday, 2004 February 10 - 5:01 pm
I recently connected an old Macintosh to my Sony high-definition rear-projection TV. Here are some notes on the project.

There's a DVI interface on the back of my Sony HDTV (KP-46WT500). It's ostensibly only designed for HDCP-compliant devices like set-top-boxes, but technically there's no reason a computer video card with DVI out shouldn't be able to connect to it. Or so it seemed.

Sony officially tells you not to try this. Perhaps they don't want to be responsible for those who fry their TVs by overdriving the scan rate or something. So I was nervous about it at first... but eventually curiosity got the better of me.

I have a Blue and White G3 Macintosh ("Yosemite") with an ATI Radeon 7000 PCI card on it. It has a DVI output. I connected it to the TV, and turned everything on... and sure enough, the familiar Mac OS X startup screen appeared on the TV.

But there were problems. First of all, the computer only offered me resolutions of 640x480, 720x480, and 1920x540. None of those were really acceptable (the first two didn't offer enough screen real-estate, and the last gave me a very squished picture [non-square pixels]). Second, all three resolutions suffered from serious overscan.

So I found (and paid for) a shareware program called DisplayConfigX, which let me tweak the resolution and border settings for the video card. I found that the TV would accept 480p, 540p, and 720p settings at 59.947 Hz, but it still had overscan problems. I fiddled with the "porch" settings (the size of the borders around the "active" part of the screen, and that helped... but was surprised to find that there was a limit to how large the top and bottom borders could be, even if I kept the overall number of scan lines constant (525 for 480p, 563 for 540p, and 750 for 720p). The right and left borders seemed more forgiving.

Eventually I got a stable and usable picture with these settings:

Vertical: Active=700, FrontPorch=8, BackPorch=37, Sync=5
Horizontal: Active=1180, FrontPorch=120, BackPorch=264, Sync=80
Scan Rate: 59.947 Hz

The DisplayConfigX program itself was functional, but not very friendly; it required me to restart to test my settings, and gave me no easy way to revert to a working default setting if my chosen values were unviewable. In addition, it didn't offer a graphical representation of how my "porch" settings would affect the screen. In the end, though, it did the job I needed it to do, and it didn't cost me very much. (Besides, there aren't many alternatives for OS X users.)

Your mileage may vary on projects like this. Don't forget to watch for screen burn-in if using your expensive big-screen TV as a computer monitor!
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Posted by Ken in: techwatch

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