Unable to get XBMC Playback from Windows to fill entire TV screen
#1
Question 
I was wondering if someone could help me out. I currently have my Panasonic 50" TV connected as a 2nd monitor to my computer, and have it setup for cloned display. I have a Harmy 880 remote and a USB receiver setup so that when I select the XBMC activity on the remote, it opens XBMC and switches my TV to the input for my PC.

(At some point I'll set it up so that it only opens on the 2nd monitor, any suggestions on the easiest way to do this and have XBMC open up maximized on the TV would be appreciated, could try to use Display Fusion again).

The issue I'm having is that doing it this way I'm unable to get XBMC to fill the entire screen. When my Windows Desktop is shown on the TV, there are black bars only on the sides. During XBMC playback the bars are on top and on the sides. With those same settings it seems to look fine on my PC monitor, but just not my TV. I obviously don't want the picture to be stretched.

I'm able to set my TV to the 'Zoom' format and in XBMC I set the Zoom to 20%. For the video playback I set it to custom and the 'Zoom Amount to .8 and that does the trick for playback. The problem is the top and bottom of the XBMC Menus are cutoff when navigating, but the playback looks fine and does not seem distorted or cutoff at all.

Does anyone know if there is an easier way to do this? The PC Monitor and TV are setup as 1680x1050. Possibly if I was able to set them up separately instead of setting to 'Duplicate Display' would that help at all? Because of the resolution and the TV, not sure if there is any good way to do this.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated! I apologize as I'm a newbie at this, trying to get everything setup right.

~J
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#2
I'd guess the problem is that the PC display and your TV have different resolutions. If you're cloning the PC display the picture is never going to look right on your TV because the resolutions differ. How TVs react to a resolution that doesn't match the actual TV screen will depend on the TV.

I would set up the TV as a second screen, not a clone of the main screen. That way you can set it to the correct resolution.

JR
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#3
Thanks for the feedback. Do you happen to have any reccomendations on the best way to do this so I can have XBMC automatically open on the 2nd Monitor (TV), using my Harmony remote? I tried to use Display Fusion awhile ago with another program which I don't remember the name of that I mapped a remote key to.

Does anyone have a reccomendation for the cleanest way of doing this? Wasn't sure if there was a better combination of programs.

Thanks in advance!

~J
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#4
XBMC has a setting to use the 2nd display. It'll be in System settings somewhere. I don't have a dual screen setup so I can't comment further.

Note that using XBMC on a second screen is rarely satisfactory. If you want to continue working on the main screen you'll have to enable the "Use a fullscreen window rather than true fullscreen" setting, and on many GPUs this causes tearing in the video playback.

JR
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