Hello everyone, I have an odd issue with an external monitor, an old TV I’ve had for a while. It has 3 HDMI ports and one VGA one - the HDMIs eventually all failed and started flickering but I figured I can still use the VGA one.
The problem is, when I connect my either my old Macbook (or my wife’s Surface) using a Mini DisplayPort-to-VGA adapter or a new Macbook using a USB-C-to-VGA adapter the image is consistently stretched horizontally - the aspect ratio is off. Oddly enough, if you manually set the aspect ratio in a video player like VLC that works well.
What's going on? Since I have three computers with two different OSes and two different ports I figured it gotta be a TV setting. The TV is an old Toshiba 52XV645U - check out the manual here:
http://www.specsserver.com/CACHE/FRUTOFSDFKYK.PDF. I noticed that on page 48 it does mention aspect ratios and auto-stretching - but, alas, those don’t work with the VGA input.
Is there any way to force a certain resolution / aspect ratio? I already tried things like SwitchResX to no avail, and looking at the TV now 1280x1024 looks stretched while manually setting the aspect ratio to 4:3 in VLC for a video produces the best results.
Any help would be appreciated!
EDIT: this same problem persists in extended, mirrored AND clamshell modes. Both 1280x1024 and 800x600 (the only two resolutions shown by macOS in Displays) look stretched on the monitor, even though 800x600 = 4:3 ratio which looks good as a forced aspect ratio in fullscreen video in VLC!
