unable to manually change hdmi resolution when using a tv as a monitor

Question

Recently i hooked up an old tv for use in my home studio. It is a 32" JVC LCD screen...pretty old: http://www.cnet.com/products/jvc-lt-32g80su-32-lcd-tv/specs/ What I want to do is to connect this TV with hdmi, from my desktop using ATI radeon HD 3600 series video card..as my main monitor. The screen works perfect on resolution 1280x720..which is a little below the native resolution on the tv (1366x768).Except, the screen becomes just a notch too big for the physical size on the tv.(about 1cm outside in both directions..so i can barely see the toolbar). Btw i am running linux, which is a Mint cinnamon 17 3.13.0-24 generic kernel. Anyway, I tried connecting with a windows laptop and i made it fit the screen perfectly above and below the native resolution of the tv. So i tried adding manual resolutions using the xrandr as shown in this tutorial: http://community.linuxmint.com/tutorial/view/877 For me it worked for DVI or VGA connections, but with the hdmi (which is the alternative on the Tv) the tv only became black.

So now i am wondering what's going on here. Could it be the video driver installed not supporting the requested hdmi resolutions ? Do i need to install the proprietary drivers provided by the amd perhaps ?

Answer 1

Not sure about the HDMI resolutions and your driver, but for the part where the edges of the picture get cut off on the TV, check your overscan settings. http://www.engadget.com/2010/05/27/hd-101-overscan-and-why-all-tvs-do-it/

Answer 2

Solution: by compensating for overscanning in linux solved the problem, using the 1280x720 resolution.

xrandr --output HDMI-1 --set underscan on
xrandr --output HDMI-1 --set "underscan hborder" 30 --set "underscan vborder" 18

Depending on your screen, but 30 and 18 worked perfectly for the JVC. Found on this post https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=145639