It’s come to my attention while on various forums that this is something many people struggle with. It’s easy to connect up your PC via D-Sub, DVI or HDMI to a modern LCD HD-TV but for those of us with an older but perfectly good widescreen Cathode Ray Tube TV the process can be a bit more difficult. Follow these steps and you should be OK…

Introduction
After installing your graphics drivers you can set your resolution and you will be offered a selection to choose from. Until recently (HDTV) support for television resolution is pretty patchy and it’s very unlikely that the offered list will contain any widescreen resolutions that will work on a TV. You will probably get the resolutions that relate to PAL and NTSC (720×576 and 720×480) but choosing one of these will result in an incorrect aspect ratio on a widescreen TV – everyone looks exceptionally fat!

In fact you can even do a google search and still be none the wiser as to the resolution that you need let alone how to set it in the driver. Worry no more though as help is here.

My Hardware and Drivers
Just a quick note on my hardware and drivers. I’m using integrated Nvidia 6150 graphics on my ASUS M2NPV-VM motherboard along with the Nvidia drivers supplied via the ASUS website (82.05) as these seem to work best for me. The TV I’m outputing too is a Toshiba TX-28DT2 and it’s connected from the PC via S-video through an S-video to SCART adapter and into the TV by SCART. I’m going to show how to set this up in the Nvidia driver but I would expect the ATI driver setup to be similar. Whether there’s enough options in Intel or VIA graphics drivers I wouldn’t like to speculate.

Create a custom resolution
The resolution that you need for widescreen PAL is 1024×576, this is the standard number of horizontal lines for PAL but with many more vertical ones. You may look as hard as you like for this resolution but it will not be in your driver no matter which version you install – we have to add it as a custom resolution.

First off, go into the standard Windows display properties and click on the ‘Advanced’ button. For me this pops up another window with a tab labelled ‘Geforce6150′ which in turn pops out a window to the left where I can select ‘Screen Resolutions and Refresh Rates’. Your particular driver setup may have different screens and menus but you should be able to find the same options.

We need to click on ‘add’ to add a custom resolution and we need to set a width of 1024 pixels, a height of 576 pixels, a colour quality of 32bit and a refresh rate of 60Hz.

In some driver versions you also get a section in this same screen to set the custom timings, in my driver I have to go back to the previous screen and click on ‘timings’. Either way that’s the next place to go.

The only timings that you should need to change are the ‘front-end active’ value which you should set equal to your resolution i.e. 1024×576.

Try it out
Once you have setup the custom resolution it should now be as simple to use as selecting any other resolution. I have found from time to time that the Windows Media Center software will allow you to choose the resolution that you want but will then immediately resort back to another. I have previously got around this by taking media center off ‘full screen’ mode while making the selection.

As you can see from the screen dump below you can now enjoy TV in all it’s widescreen goodness. This screen shot was taken just by using the ‘printscreen’ key on my keyboard while watching in full screen mode.

You can tell by the position of the score caption/graphic that it’s being shown in widescreen. Anyway, hope this has helped and if anyone has any questions please feel free to leave a comment.

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