PC Video Output to TV: Aspect Ratio Discrepancy

[151rby]

I'm not quite sure if I should post this in the hardware forum instead, so please forgive me if this topic is miscategorized.

I'm using a Dell Inspiron 15 with an Intel(R) HD 4000 graphics card. I use a hardware emulator on my computer to play old arcade games, and I want to use an old cathode ray television as my A/V output device. I got an HDMI-to-composite converter for this purpose, and it mostly works but I still have one major problem, which is that the picture appearing on the old TV looks distorted because my laptop screen has an aspect ratio of 16:9 while the old TV has an aspect ratio of 4:3.

I wish to make the image on my TV look undistorted. It would be great if I could just fit the picture to the TV vertically and "chop off" the left and right ends. I wouldn't lose any important parts of the picture that way, since the games are automatically pillarboxed on my laptop's widescreen display. If that's not practical, then I would settle for displaying a letterboxed (and, in effect, windowboxed) image on my TV. Any tips?

[DaveLembke]

right-click on desktop to bring up menu and select screen resolution
select advanced settings
Select Intel(R) Graphics and Media Control Panel which should be there with the Intel GPU
on scaling use drop down to customize aspect ratio
You now will have sliders for horizontal and verticle to make 4:3 which might be 100:75
click apply and your laptop display will change  to 100:75 which should be the same as 4:3 and it will send this ratio to tv

*If 100:75 is the combination that works for your TV, your laptop will then show it not fitting well. You may have to play with the values to get it to something other than 100:75 to work. But I believe your system with the Intel 4000 will have the same interface as I see on this new desktop with Intel HD Graphics running Windows 7 Pro

Also I hope the HDMI to composite converter works well as for I have tried other converters such as years ago when I made my first HTPC and converted from DVI to Composite with a digital to analog converter and the quality was not sharp, but kind of fuzzy. I ended up resolving this by upgrading to a TV with S-video and got a video card with S-video and that made for far better picture quality on the CRT 27" TV


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