WMC display size stuck on some strange setting

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robert01

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WMC display size stuck on some strange setting

#1

Post by robert01 » Sat Mar 31, 2018 12:51 am

Any ideas on how to fix the display settings of WMC when the GUI method doesn't work?

Running WMC on Win7 all is patched and up to date. I only connect the WMC PC to an IP network for patch updates. As a PC it only runs WMC for live TV and playing back recordings.

Problem:
Some how the display of WMC has flipped to an unusual aspect/resolution, its chopped off on all four sides and has the appearance that its zoomed in. Resetting this within WMC is straight forward but this time it has no effect.

It appears the only thing that is broken is within WMC itself.
1. It records from live TV as per normal. I installed VLC to playback recorded stuff -- no problems there.
2. The previous tells me that there are no driver issues with TV tuner card.
3. Desktop display has remained unchanged.
4. Items #1 and #3 tells me there are no issues with the monitor and video card drivers.

Thanks in advance

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Crash2009

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#2

Post by Crash2009 » Sat Mar 31, 2018 7:38 am


Space

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#3

Post by Space » Sat Mar 31, 2018 11:57 am

Display type needs to be set to "Television" in WMC if you don't want overscan applied to the picture before it gets to your display device. All other device type settings apply overscan (cut off the edges of the picture) before it is sent to your device.

The intent of doing this is to make sure no matter what device you use, you will see about 5% of the picture cut off on all edges. Yes, the intent is to actually make it so that you are missing the edges of the picture!

The only device that has built-in overscan is the TV, so that is why when you set WMC to "Television", it sends the FULL picture to the device. It is assumed that the TV itself will cut the edges off the picture for you instead of WMC having to do it.

Of course, these days, there is little need to overscan the picture, and any self-respecting videophile will want to see the full 1080p picture, so the way to do that is to set WMC to "Television" and then set your TV set to disable overscan for that video input. This lets you see the entire picture like every self-respecting TV watcher should strive for :-).

Once you do this, there are also some registry settings that push out the WMC GUI so that things appear more on the edges of the TV instead of looking like they are too close to the middle of the picture (since you are no longer cutting off the edges and "zooming" in on the picture). You can read about those here: viewtopic.php?f=5&t=7131

EDIT: One other thing I thought of that could be your problem is that you have the "Zoom" setting within WMC set to one that is zooming the picture. You can get to this setting by playing a video and then pressing the left arrow key a few time until you get to the "Zoom" settings. From here use the up/down arrow keys to select the first setting. This should set the zoom level to "no zoom", or the normal setting.

robert01

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#4

Post by robert01 » Sat Mar 31, 2018 8:25 pm

Been using WMC a long time and running Setup Display was the first thing I tried. The actual Set Display is functional because I can alter the display to some that is not appropriate and it will display it. For some reason if I give the correct value (1080p,60Hz) it doesn't like it and nothing changes. Also I cannot guarantee that any other display setting is being displayed as it should be.

The amount missing is substantial in this screen shot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Televisio ... tion_1.jpg
1. Only the top part of the bottom red ribbon would be visible, the same amount would be missing from top.
2. Vertically also symmetrical. On the right hand side anything to the right of the letter "I" in the work "Live" is missing. A similar section missing on the left hand side.

The only thing altered from the default is increasing the playback buffer by changing a registry setting (done a long time ago).

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#5

Post by Space » Sat Mar 31, 2018 9:09 pm

Did you check the zoom setting as I mentioned in the second part of my last post?

Alan G

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#6

Post by Alan G » Sat Mar 31, 2018 9:15 pm

Do you have a graphics card or are you running off of Intel CPU graphics. If it is the latter, there are issues with overscan. Usually once you correct it the display should be fine. This link might be helpful IF this is your issue: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en ... 0+overscan

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#7

Post by adam1991 » Sat Mar 31, 2018 9:24 pm

OK, everyone is so laser-focused on WMC, all y'all are forgetting about the TV itself.

Yes, I've found the TV itself in my house somehow switched to some other display size/aspect ratio/resolution. Usually it's my wife fiddling around and hitting the wrong button, but sometimes it's a matter of someone sitting on the remote and hitting exactly the wrong button.

I wrestled with this just a few months ago, where one of the inputs on my TV--the one for the Fire TV--got set to something else. Like all y'all, I kept looking at the streaming box and was unable to figure it out. After awhile I went to the TV settings--and there it was. I have no idea how it got set there. All other inputs were fine.

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#8

Post by robert01 » Sun Apr 01, 2018 12:43 am

Checked the Registry settings [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Media Center\Settings\MCE.PerUserSettings]\margin*
The only difference I found was "marginSaved"=dword:00000000 is the other posting it was 00000001 setting it to that value didn't help

The display device is a DELL monitor not a TV

Somebody suggested it might be a graphics card issue. If it was I would expect displaying the desktop and .wtv files played back on VLC would also be affected but they are all good.

The actual fix was the ZOOM function. All the time been using never noticed that. Thanks for you help
Last edited by robert01 on Sun Apr 01, 2018 12:55 am, edited 1 time in total.

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Crash2009

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#9

Post by Crash2009 » Sun Apr 01, 2018 12:47 am

Zoom fixed
Last edited by Crash2009 on Sun Apr 01, 2018 5:32 am, edited 1 time in total.

Space

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#10

Post by Space » Sun Apr 01, 2018 4:37 am

I'm glad you were able to fix your problem, but please, when you ask people for free help on the Internet, make sure you read every reply thoroughly and that you respond to let people know what you tried/looked at.

After the solution to your problem was posted, you continued posting as if you had read all suggestions up to that point, but it was not clear if you read the second part of the post with the solution, which resulted in many other people responding with other possible solutions (perhaps thinking the zoom setting was ruled out as the cause).

This could have gone on for a long while if the zoom setting hadn't been mentioned again (not sure why I did, other than the fact you did not explicitly mention it at all) and many people could have been needlessly wasting more of their personal time (no one is getting payed for this) trying to solve your problem.

Anyway, thanks for letting us know the problem was resolved. Some people don't do that, and knowing that you helped someone is sometimes the only reward you get here... :D

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#11

Post by joelkirzner » Sun Apr 15, 2018 10:43 pm

Wow, I've been using WMC for over 15 years and I never thought that the monitor, tv option had any effect on the overscan.

I changed the display to TV, changed the registry margins and wouldya know it... the entire picture is displaying correctly.
I don't know what I'm going to do with all these extra CNN pixels... joy to the world!

Interestingly, I'm now noticing that some channels have some blank pixel rows at the top or bottom. Others fill the screen completely. I guess it's just the signal feed from each broadcaster that causes the difference.

The other registry setting I've had to adjust is the logical and physical width of the screen from 3840 to 3839. This was due to some mysterious single pixel white line on the right hand side of WMC on my LG 4k oled tv.

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#12

Post by rknox » Wed Aug 29, 2018 12:17 am

Space wrote:Display type needs to be set to "Television" in WMC if you don't want overscan applied to the picture before it gets to your display device. All other device type settings apply overscan (cut off the edges of the picture) before it is sent to your device.

The intent of doing this is to make sure no matter what device you use, you will see about 5% of the picture cut off on all edges. Yes, the intent is to actually make it so that you are missing the edges of the picture!

The only device that has built-in overscan is the TV, so that is why when you set WMC to "Television", it sends the FULL picture to the device. It is assumed that the TV itself will cut the edges off the picture for you instead of WMC having to do it.

Of course, these days, there is little need to overscan the picture, and any self-respecting videophile will want to see the full 1080p picture, so the way to do that is to set WMC to "Television" and then set your TV set to disable overscan for that video input. This lets you see the entire picture like every self-respecting TV watcher should strive for :-).

Once you do this, there are also some registry settings that push out the WMC GUI so that things appear more on the edges of the TV instead of looking like they are too close to the middle of the picture (since you are no longer cutting off the edges and "zooming" in on the picture). You can read about those here: http://www.thegreenbutton.tv/forums/vie ... f=5&t=7131

EDIT: One other thing I thought of that could be your problem is that you have the "Zoom" setting within WMC set to one that is zooming the picture. You can get to this setting by playing a video and then pressing the left arrow key a few time until you get to the "Zoom" settings. From here use the up/down arrow keys to select the first setting. This should set the zoom level to "no zoom", or the normal setting.


Overscan settings also a revelation to me, and I've also been using WMC since before flat screen tv's. I had to try setting display to "television" to see that this is really true! This does raise some questions though:


- (OK answered this one myself I think) I have used a setup disc to verify that I was getting the full image on the screen. So that was blu-ray running under PowerDVD, which I guess functions independently of the displayed broadcast video in wmc. True?
- But what about the old setup videos that used to be part of wmc (the pool table stuff). I used those to verify I had no overscan, at least I thought I did. How could that be possible if I had display set to flat screen or monitor?
-I saw a related post about the pixel noise on the right side of screen when using 2180p uhd settings. I get this too, even when I had display set to monitor. Does that mean the pixel noise is outside of the video image? Otherwise overscan would eliminate. i used the KB fix to eliminate the pixel noise for 1080p. Again, noise is outside of video feed?

- are there other subtle adjustments during display setup? I frankly thought this step was unnecessary as display, hdmi input and resolution all happened automatically ...

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#13

Post by rknox » Wed Aug 29, 2018 1:41 am

And one more question. I cannot see any difference (between display set to television and otherwise) on RecordedTV playback. Would content recorded under display set to monitor be recorded in an overscan state?

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#14

Post by Space » Wed Aug 29, 2018 7:23 am

Yeah, any settings you make within WMC are only for WMC and will not affect PowerDVD or any other external program.

As for the pool table videos, I don't have an explanation for that one. Perhaps they were buggy or maybe difficult to notice the difference. Or maybe the change in settings were not actually taking place for some reason.

I'm not sure about the pixel noise on 2180p or 1080p videos. But unless there is some bug, the noise is part of the video and not outside of the feed. With overscan turned off, you will sometimes see anomalies on the edges of the picture (usually just on the single line of pixels towards the edge of the frame). But usually I don't notice any issues. Watching old SD programming, however, will usually show stuff on the top of the picture (unless the station is broadcasting the SD picture in HD and they "trimmed" it so that you don't see it.) This was the line that stuff like closed captions and other data was transmitted along with the video, so any SD video that has CC will also have that white dotted line at the top.

The overscan setting is only in effect when displaying the video, so WMC will record the full frame without any overscan regardless of the TV/Monitor/etc. setting. I don't know why in your testing that you see no difference between "Monitor" and "Television". Perhaps when you transition from one to the other you need to restart some service or reboot your machine to make it take effect? I don't think this is the case, but I've experienced many weird things with WMC, so you never know.

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#15

Post by rknox » Thu Sep 13, 2018 12:59 am

I have been trying to verify that I am seeing a true 2160p image in wmc. I have a test pattern video (Video Essentials uhd version) which seems to work properly (no overscan). I then tried a 2160p image here:
https://www.cnx-software.com/2014/09/2 ... t-pattern/. When displaying this directly on htpc, it seems to work showing full 2160p, but when I display in wmc (accessing file from Pictures media library), it shows aliasing pattern suggesting the image is scaled. Wondering why wmc would not display 3840x2160 image at native resolution. Display is configured for television, no zoom etc.

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#16

Post by Crash2009 » Sat Sep 15, 2018 6:08 am

rknox wrote: Thu Sep 13, 2018 12:59 am I have been trying to verify that I am seeing a true 2160p image in WMC. I have a test pattern video (Video Essentials uhd version) which seems to work properly (no overscan). I then tried a 2160p image here:
https://www.cnx-software.com/2014/09/2 ... t-pattern/. When displaying this directly on HTPC, it seems to work showing full 2160p, but when I display in WMC (accessing file from Pictures media library), it shows aliasing pattern suggesting the image is scaled. Wondering why WMC would not display 3840x2160 image at native resolution. Display is configured for television, no zoom etc.
Might be an answer for you in this thread.

viewtopic.php?f=5&t=8325#p84273

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