Skip to main content

Notice

Please note that most of the software linked on this forum is likely to be safe to use. If you are unsure, feel free to ask in the relevant topics, or send a private message to an administrator or moderator. To help curb the problems of false positives, or in the event that you do find actual malware, you can contribute through the article linked here.
Topic: EAC and other screen displays (Read 2450 times) previous topic - next topic
0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

EAC and other screen displays

Am I overlooking something that should be obvious?
Most of my audio stuff is done on a older Win7 machine. I still use it because it has some very useful audio software for which there are no versions for new Windows OS versions, and because it has a CD-RW and a DVD-RW drive that work particularly well for both extraction and writing new discs. Essentially everything else I do, computer wise, is on this Win10 machine.

For some years I had a 24 inch Dell monitor. Keyboard, mouse, and monitor were switched back and forth between machines with a USB based KVM switch.

I’ve moved. As an experiment I purchased a 32 inch full HD TV as a monitor (much less expensive than a large computer monitor). Its only inputs are HDMI. It is quite satisfactory for me on the Win10 machine, running at native 1920 x 1080 resolution.  On the Win7 machine it didn’t fully work off the older machine’s HDMI output. The resolution was lower and there was a 1 inch or so unused border around all screens, but things seemed to be otherwise ok.

Now only the keyboard and mouse are on the KVM switch. The TV inputs are selected via the TV’s remote. The Win7 only goes on-line if I want to download some audio material to it. This has led to the browser version getting automatically upgraded recently but there have been no other software changes.

This seemed ok enough at first but then I found out that some programs will not size their option screens usefully on the Win7 computer. EAC, as a major example, fits its main screen on screen well enough but screens like EAC Options are unuseable. The display is too huge to fit on the screen. Its bottom, with the final controls, is off somewhere in the physical world desktop below the monitor. A couple of other programs display options screens with text too tiny to read. None of these can be resized.

I unpacked the older 24 inch monitor and set it up, attached it to the Win7 machine through its older analog VGA cable. This is almost how it was before I move here and obtained the 32" TV, except that the video previously went through the KVM switch along with the mouse and keyboard. However, now on this older 24 inch monitor that I used for years, it has the same video problems with several programs that I described above. The only difference is that it fills the entire screen, as it should.  It is running at 1680 x 1050 resolution, which is probably what it was running at before since that is what the system recommends, and automatically selects.

To debug, I changed the Win7 video output to go through the KVM switch, as it used to, but that made no difference.

So, how could those programs have been working usefully before but are not useable now when there has absolutely been no software changes except for browser versions. and no hardware changes? Could there be something simple I’m missing?

Re: EAC and other screen displays

Reply #1
HDMI allows a sender to detect the capabilities of the receiver, and I suspect Win7 isn't doing that properly (or perhaps at all).

On the Win7 PC, right-click on an empty area of desktop and select "screen resolution", make sure it's set to 1920x1080 (the native resolution of the TV screen).  This won't affect your built-in screen, because the HDMI port is (essentially) the projector connection, and you can switch outputs using a hot-key or just closing the lid.  The desktop icons might move around a bit though.

I use a 4K 24" monitor through a HDMI KVM to two PCs: a Win7 notebook, and a Unix system running the full 3840x2160.
It's your privilege to disagree, but that doesn't make you right and me wrong.

Re: EAC and other screen displays

Reply #2
I had assumed that the Win7 computer was not capable of providing the 1920X1080 TV resolution because the display didn’t seem to be the same as on the Win10 machine, especially in that it has that black, unused screen space surrounding all output from on Win7 computer. However, it turns out the Win7 machine is (claiming to be) outputting 1920X1080 to the TV. It is only limited to 1680 x 1050 with the 24 inch monitor.

The problem with the dialogue boxes displayed by various programs not fitting into the display exist regardless of which monitor I attach. That error did not exist for all the years that the 24 inch monitor was my only monitor, but nothing on the Win7 computer has changed, at least deliberately, as far as I am aware.

Re: EAC and other screen displays

Reply #3
Sounds like the DPI (display scaling) setting has changed. You'll find that in the control panel in the display section.

Re: EAC and other screen displays

Reply #4
Yes, changing the font size for the display resolved the problem. It now uses the full TV screen and dialogue boxes fit on screen, at least for the few programs I just experimented with. It turns out that I still need to use the 1680 x 1050 resolution or the text is too tiny for my eyes, but at least it now appears that the setup is useable again. Thank you.

Re: EAC and other screen displays

Reply #5
Yes, changing the font size for the display resolved the problem. It now uses the full TV screen and dialogue boxes fit on screen
Yes, that would affect how large menus are relative to the desktop, but I don't understand why changing the font size affects the scan.

It turns out that I still need to use the 1680 x 1050 resolution or the text is too tiny for my eyes
Not on the 32" TV surely?  And the TV will be upscaling the 1680x1050 to its native 1920x1080 and thus producing some fuzziness... and if it's not upscaling then there will be a black border (although not much top and bottom).
It's your privilege to disagree, but that doesn't make you right and me wrong.

Re: EAC and other screen displays

Reply #6
Quote
I don't understand why changing the font size affects the scan.

I don't understand the question. Where and how did "scan" get into the conversation?

Yes, the text is too small. It is necessary to set it to a larger size.  I presume I did the setting as soon as I first hooked up the Win7 computer to the TV, out of necessity, and just never though about it again. It was set to 200% which made reading easier, but that doesn't work for everything, thus this inquiry. Now it is 150% on both computers. That isn't enough but 200% obviously introduces other problems. Programs I use heavily on the Win10 computer (browser, word processor, spreadsheet, and a few others) have their own text scaling,  which doesn't adversely effect dialogue sizes. The audio programs, and a few other older things I use on the Win7 computer don't have that facility so I have to put up with the reading difficulties.




T

Re: EAC and other screen displays

Reply #7
Now it is 150% on both computers. That isn't enough but 200% obviously introduces other problems.
There are options for custom scaling too. You might be able to find a value between 150% and 200% that is still readable without introducing blurriness from setting the wrong resolution on your TV. (It's been a while since I've used Windows 7 so I don't remember exactly where the setting is.)

Re: EAC and other screen displays

Reply #8
Quote
I don't understand why changing the font size affects the scan.
I don't understand the question. Where and how did "scan" get into the conversation?
"Scan" as per the painting of video on the display.
Yes, changing the font size for the display resolved the problem. It now uses the full TV screen and dialogue boxes fit on screen...
How did changing the font size cause the screen to lose the black borders?
It's your privilege to disagree, but that doesn't make you right and me wrong.

Re: EAC and other screen displays

Reply #9
Actually, it is a basic human right to disagree. Only under some forms of totalitarianism, such as various of today's social media, and governments, is it de facto converted into a often disallowed privilege.

As to why changing the font size let the display fill the entire screen, instead of being smaller and having that very obvious black border around it, I don't exactly know. Some dialogue boxes were larger, especially vertically, so that they didn't fit on screen while the main window of the desktop, and every program's main screen, were smaller than the physical screen. The problem dialogue boxes obviously did not 'preserve the aspect ratio' under the larger font use but the full screen display seemed to be a different problem.

Re: EAC and other screen displays

Reply #10
How did changing the font size cause the screen to lose the black borders?
The black borders may have been added by the computer instead of the TV. Changing the font size setting could have reset some other settings at the same time. (TVs tend to have nonsense in their identification data that causes computers to do strange things like that. I have my TV attached to my computer, and my computer detects the correct native resolution but adds black borders at the sides unless I turn off aspect ratio correction.)

Or maybe it's just a coincidence and something else unrelated caused the black borders to go away.

 

Re: EAC and other screen displays

Reply #11
Memory tell me that once I reduced the font size to what the system could handle, the black borders went away, as did the outsized dialogue displays that had their controls off screen, Things were good, except that the text was smaller than was easy for me to read.

Then I decided to experiment with the 24 inch monitor again. That didn’t last long. It worked entirely properly but it isn’t a large enough picture for me. I went back to the TV.

Once again, the black border is around all screens. The display is smaller than it should be, but larger than what the 24 inch monitor can produce. The dialogue boxes are properly sized for the display, so everything is useable. I have tried everything I can think of but I can’t get the full size display back onto the TV. The Win10 machine still works properly.

I have hunted but I can’t find any explicit aspect ratio settings in Win7. I am quite familiar with the concept, it seems to be part of every photo and graphics program, but I find nothing in Win7 for the system as a whole.

Re: EAC and other screen displays

Reply #12
Unfortunately, the setting isn't part of Windows itself; you'll have to use a vendor-provided control program to find and adjust the setting. You may even need to install the program yourself if it wasn't automatically installed alongside the display driver.

On my laptop, for example, I use Intel Graphics Command Center and find the Scale setting, but it will probably be different on your PC.

Re: EAC and other screen displays

Reply #13
Isn't what you're talking about HDMI overscan? Perhaps you decreased it in graphics driver settings.

Re: EAC and other screen displays

Reply #14
Isn't what you're talking about HDMI overscan? Perhaps you decreased it in graphics driver settings.
I thought about that, but you'd usually get the edge of the desktop off the screen because of the TV overscanning (broadcast TV is still formatted to expect the TV to overscan, I have no idea why this is necessary now we have digital broadcast).  However, if the PC says "I'm outputting to a TV so I'll shrink the desktop within the frame" but the TV is set for 1:1, then there would be the borders.
It's your privilege to disagree, but that doesn't make you right and me wrong.