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[burchmere21]

Just starting out with MC but running into an issue.  When I've queued some songs to list and go to "playing now", the kind of slide show background pics often appear distorted - kind of like on an old TV when the sync was off.  Images appear kind of diagonally smeared.  If I click anything to get album art to display - album art looks fine and then upon next transition the background looks fine.  But once the album art fades out, seems like after the next transition all the background images are distorted.  Any ideas?
Thanks.

[burchmere21]

just to add...
all album/song info text is fine.  If I go to Display View then back to something else like Playing Now, background is good again until a transition or two later.

[burchmere21]

a few screen captures attached...
distort1 is after album fades.
distort2 is moving cursor to get album art back, but background remains faded.

[Hendrik]

This is odd. Never seen anything like it. What kind of graphics card do you have?

[burchmere21]

I don't currently have access to the machine, but it is a Dell XPS 15z (L511z) laptop.  I think it has integrated Intel graphics (HD3000) plus Nvidia GeForce 525M?  I'll confirm this tonight.
Perhaps I diddled with some setting that I shouldn't have, but very odd that sometimes it looks/works fine - then it goes screwy.

[burchmere21]

I figured out what was going on.  My Nvidia graphics control allows for the desktop to be sized to fit the display.  Doing that to fit the desktop to my plasma resulted in a slightly off standard display resolution (instead of 1920 x 1080, it was set for 1858 x 1056?).  That somehow resulted in the distorted backdrop images (though I'm still not sure why some looked OK).  Anyway, once I undid the desktop resizing and resolution is back to standard 1920 x 1080, everything looks great.

[glynor]

Doing that to fit the desktop to my plasma resulted in a slightly off standard display resolution (instead of 1920 x 1080, it was set for 1858 x 1056?)

They do that to compensate for the overscan enabled by default on most HDTVs (which drives me crazy but that's another thing).  Otherwise, most people who connect a computer to a HDTV, wouldn't be able to see the outermost edges of the screen (including the Start button and the menu bars of maximized applications).

This is terrible, though, because then your TV is running at a non-native resolution.  This means the OS's pixels don't line up with the real pixels on the display, and everything is dithered.  Ugh.

Always set the display to 1:1 pixel mode when connecting a PC.  Different TVs call this different things.  On Panasonics it is often called 1:1 Pixel Mode.  On Samsung displays, doing so can sometimes be quite inscrutable, but is more often called "Just Scan" or "Full".  Search AVSForum for your TV manufacturer and "overscan" if you can't figure it out.

Then, you can just set the nvidia card to real 1080p and you won't lose some of the screen edges.

[Hendrik]

Odd that it would cause this distortion, and only in the background image at that. Wonder if I can somehow reproduce that....

[burchmere21]

interesting info.  I'll look into the exact settings for my TV.  And in the meantime, no sooner (an hour or so later) had I replied to the forum that I'd figured out the problem, I ran into a very similar but slightly different problem.

The music album art, transitioning backdrops, everything looked great after returning the resolution of graphics on PC back to 1920 x 1080.  But then I went into Photos, and tried a slide show of some pics from my Nikon digital SLR, and saw very similar distortion of photos!  Did not see it in photo album view, but once in slide show, it would either show the picture OK, or briefly show it OK (1-2 seconds) then it would distort similar to what I described earlier on the original problem.  Very confused, especially since some photos would show OK, then when I restarted slideshow to try again - a different set of photos would show the problem.

I can't help but think this must be a graphics issue on my PC, but don't understand why it doesn't happen all the time for all images?  And why it can and does display some pics OK, but only momentarily - then shows them with the angular distortion.  Any ideas?