How to Improve Pandora's TV Out control? Aspect ratio and scaling?


dgame

Active Member
Joined
Oct 1, 2006
Messages
945
Hi,


Is there a way to set Pandora’s screen resolution from to 640x480 instead of 800x480?


I edited the Screen Section in xorg.conf but it makes no changes in appearance.


The xorg.0.log indicates:


(--) omapfb(0): Virtual size is 800x480 (pitch 800)


Is there any way to change this? Is this what I want to change anyway?


Thanks!


EDIT: I think a better approach is to tweak the TV Out controls like the Maemo community did:


See post #6 below or
My link





Thanks!!
 
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I had back expirience with messing with the xorg.conf. I really don't know why you would want to set it like that. Could you explain the reasons?


If the xorg won't come up after restarting go to the terminal and redo your changes and reboot.
 
I made a TV Out cable and my "TV" is a Sony PVM 1944Q CRT Monitor with a 4:3 aspect ratio.


I have the same question as this person for the N900:

there seems to be an API to change the behaviour of the TV output on the n900. At least the media player uses it to e.g. display things with a different layout on the internal screen and the tv-out.

I am asking this because i think it's a great thing to add to all those 640x480 (4:3) programs and especially emulators. The problem these have is that the have a black border left and right to accomodate for the 800x480 main screen and on tv-out they get another top and bottom border to display the entire internal display contents on the tv-out. The result is a 4:3 image on the 4:3 tv-out with black borders on all four sides and with pixels being lost. This isn't useful at all.


I would be really cool if these applications could just request the tv.out to zoom/crop the 4:3 tv-output. That way most emulated games would run full screen and without any pixel loss.





How can this be achieved?
From: http://maemo.org/community/maemo-developers/howto_configure_borderless_4-3_tv-out_on_n900/?org_openpsa_qbpager_net_nemein_discussion_posts_page=1


I have the same question about the Pandora.
 
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The OMAPs framebuffer is created right at the start. You can manipulate it with the omapfb.mode option. I haven't tried this and probably won't have time to any time soon, but if you follow this guide for creating a bootable SD card, and in your boot.txt file append "omapfb.mode=dvi:640x480MR-24@60" to the setenv line, that may work. Big big emphasis on the may. It might not work at all and you just get a black screen from a mode it doesn't support. It may work partially, with the image left justified and a big black bar on the right. It might stretch the image entirely automatically somehow though I don't think that this is likely. It might draw 640 pixels across one line and then draw the next 160 pixels from the next line to fill in the rest of the display giving a weirdly skewed picture.


My bet is on black screen. I bet there is a mode that will work in conjunction with tweaks to the xorg.conf file, but getting the right combination could prove time consuming.
 
Thanks WizardStan,


I setup a boot SD card and appended the line in the autobot.txt and boot.txt to be sure and it behaves like a normal Pandora.


So for now the best I can do is modify the tvout script to use a smaller vertical resolution (~400 lines) and this puts things in the correct aspect ratio, but does not address the original problem.


Need a way to zoom TV Out like in media players or DVD players.





I think the Maemo/N900 community has figured it out with this plugin/applet:





The TV out control home plugin has been written by Ville Syrjälä - I've just packaged his source for Extras. This thread is the "bugtracker" link for the package, so if you experience any problems with this, report your problems here.

Features of the plugin that are not available in the control panel:


* Aspect ratio control - switch between 4:3 and 16:9


* Scale control - scale the display to fill the TV screen area, or make it smaller



Link to Maeomo TV Out Control thread including Source Code

I don't know if any of that could be applicable to the Pandora.

Screenshot-20110113-131745.jpg
 
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