TV out problem- 4:3 laptop to widescreen TV

[Mahzes]

Well, I finally got around to sorting out the TV-out on my laptop. Considering I have a subscription to Crunchyroll, it's pretty awesome to be able to legally watch streaming stuff on my TV.

Except, one thing's come up. It's by no means drastic, but still a bit of an annoyance.

See, whilst I have a widescreen TV, my laptop isn't. And consider the whole point of TV-out is for the TV to display whatever the laptop's showing.... yeah. I'm basically getting my 4:3 laptop display stretched horizontally to fit my widescreen TV.

Again, not a problem in itself, but the problem comes about when I try to watch anything in widescreen. Since the laptop's 4:3, it plays the widescreen video with black borders at the top and bottom. On my TV, it still has the black borders at the top and bottom, except is stretched to fit the TV, even though the video itself is widescreen.

I've tried playing around with the resolution settings but have so far come up empty. How can I set it to detect my TV as widescreen despite my laptop being 4:3? In the settings IK've found, whilst it let me adjust the resolution of the TV, it only seemed to allow aspects that were still in 4:3.

If it'll help at all, these are the stats for my laptop's graphics hardware;

[superg71]

I have the same problem with my laptop setup but luckily my TV allows me to manually 'zoom' the image so it fills the widescreen with no letterboxing. Are you sure you can't do this with your TV?

[osprey4]

Hi, Mahzes and Superg71:

Welcome to TechIMO!

Although your laptop panel is 4:3, your graphics adapter should allow you to rescale the video output to match your HDTV, usually 1920x1080. You should be able to set this in desktop properties. The limiting factor is your graphics adapters ability to support a resolution that high.

[Mahzes]

Thanks for the reply.

For the record, my TV isn't HD, just a regular widescreen LCD.

I've tried poking around with the settings you mentioned, but oddly it only seems to allow me 4:3 resolutions. Even if I can increase the resolution, it's basically stuck to 4:3, regardless of size.

[Flying JJ]

You need a 16:9 resolution, 1920x1080 is a 16:9. If you can get to that, you will be ok. Your drivers/video card may not support it. Keep in mind that some movies are also formatted for having the little black boxes above and below the picture. Maybe see if there are newer drivers out for your card that do support these formats.

[osprey4]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mahzes

Thanks for the reply.

For the record, my TV isn't HD, just a regular widescreen LCD.

I've tried poking around with the settings you mentioned, but oddly it only seems to allow me 4:3 resolutions. Even if I can increase the resolution, it's basically stuck to 4:3, regardless of size.

This is either a limitation of your graphics adapter or your monitor drivers are not installed properly.

[Mahzes]

Okay, tried out 1920x1080 and got some strange results.

The laptop itself has no issues display it, even though most of the display is off-screen. However, I just get the word 'unsupport' appearing on the TV screen.

So from what I can tell, it looks like my laptop supports it, but the TV doesn't?

[Flying JJ]

then1920x1080 is an HD resolution, try a lower resolution that isn't HD but is a widescreen ratio, it may work. See if one of the ones from the link work. You want to figure out what aspect ratio your TV can handle then pick a resolution from the list.

Common Widescreen Resolutions - WSGFWiki

[Mahzes]

Just had a quick shot at it.

My laptop doesn't seem to support many of the resolutions in the list aside from 1080. I think anything over 900 gives an 'unsupport' message.

I didn't try every available option mind, although none of the ones that matched the 16:9 ratio in the list worked. I should just sit down and try every possible resolution it'll let me use and see if any of those come close.

The sickening thing in all this is that, on the first day I set up my TV-out, I had something that was close to 16:9 (there were still slight borders around the image, but not huge black bars like when running 16:9 on 4:3), but can't for the life of me remember what I did. I was just mucking around with some settings and can't seem to duplicate what it was that I did.

[Flying JJ]

What make and model laptop and TV? Those are the resolutions and aspect ratios that exist. How are you getting the signal from the laptop to the TV.